Kimono

I have an old silk kimono that I wear about the house. It makes me feel so elegant and bohemian, with its heavy dark blue and green jacquard weave, with occasional flashes of its bright scarlet lining.

I sometimes feel sad that I have to take it off when I leave the house, but I must. It is so long that it would graze the ground and I couldn’t ruin something so beautiful.

The obvious solution was to copy my kimono, but cut it off at hip level to make a sort of elegant light jacket. I measured it up and drafted the pattern in Grafis (pretty simple really, its just a series of rectangles).

The fabric is some silk I bought a while back at the closing down sale of a shop across town. I bought it because it was silk and had a nice drape and was one of the more colourful items in the shop. The fact that its a difficult combination of yellow and beige has been the main thing preventing me from doing anything with it until now. Its not an easy colour to pull off, but I think it works in this context. The black around the neck should help to keep the yellow away from my face. The lining is another bit of fabric I had lying around which seems to complement it.

I hand finished a lot of it because I didn’t feel like the fabric would take well to a machine finish. In the end I’m pretty happy with how its turned out. The weather is just right at the moment for a jacket of this weight, and the jolly colour also helps to keep things light.

Well, that’s the first one out of the way. Stay tuned for number two!

Sarah

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This entry was published on March 5, 2012 at 11:08 pm. It’s filed under Projects and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

One thought on “Kimono

  1. Anne Harkin on said:

    Beauifully written, photographed and expressed! Looking forward to the next entry!

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