Year: 2015

Outfit of the Week: Summer Love

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For this week’s outfit, I decided to throw caution to the wind. The previous ensembles I’ve posted haven’t necessarily been 100% season-accurate, but this one is by far the most inappropriate for this time of year. It’s been in the negative degrees all week here, and my back deck looks like this right now.

I needed something to remind  me that it won’t be like this all year, so I decided to do a breezy summer coordination. This blue ro tsukesage is one of the last things I purchased before my health really fell apart, and I’d never had the chance to wear it, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I had initially planned to pair it with my off-white sha hakata obi, but the then I found this hitoe hakata with touches of pink that echoed the pink flowers on the kimono so well. It’s technically a little thick to wear with such a lightweight kimono, but it’s borderline and I figured since I was only dressing Tsukiko I could get away with it. I think this outfit has a lovely refreshing cool feel to it with the icy blue and white, with the hits of a cool-toned pink to liven it up a little.

Please ignore the weirdly lopsided otaiko, I pulled it out of place slightly while rotating the mannequin and didn’t realise until after I’d taken the photos. ~.~;;

Items used in this coordination

Tea Time – Kimono pattern bone china mug

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So really, the last thing this household needs is another cup. Cups, mugs, demitasses, bowls… if it was designed to hold a warm steeped or brewed beverage, odds are we’ve got at least six of it. However, when I saw this mug, on sale no less, I knew it had to come home with me.

It’s part of a larger collection by a homewares company called Maxwell & Williams, and the name of the range is appropriately Kimono

I was very tempted to buy more, but we really don’t have need or space for it. However, if anyone ever happens to come across the matching teapot or other mugs and wants to give them a good home, I certainly won’t say no 😉

Outfit of the Week: Valentine’s Day!

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I may be single, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get caught up in the ridiculous fluffy commercialism of Valentine’s Day, right? There are plenty of folks in my life whom I love. So I decided that for this week, I’d try to come up with a sort of thematic outfit. I started with this black wool komon I got from Ame a while back. The red and white designs, from a distance, remind me of hearts and snowflakes, which seemed perfect for a love-related holiday this time of year. The kimono came with a matching haori, but I decided to bring a bit of brightness to it with my well-worn red haori and a red hakata obi. I think this outfit is definitely cute and lovely, without being overly frilly or twee.

Items used in this coordination

Art Gallery – Vintage Woodblock Prints

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A few years ago on my birthday, I went to dinner with my folks and some family friends. I had a wonderful time, the food was delicious, and I got some lovely gifts.

Leslie is the daughter of my father’s godmother. Bear with me, I know this is starting to sound like the beginning of an urban legend, but it is well and truly relevant. My grandmother and I share a birthday, and I believe inherited a lot of my fascination with the Japanese aesthetic from her. Her apartment was so tastefully furnished and had a lot of beautiful Japanese antiques and art pieces. I think they had a profound impact on me when I was a young girl, more so than I realized until recently. Kay, Leslie’s mother, was my grandmother’s dear friend when they were young, and was my father’s godmother. Leslie is family, even though not related by blood.

 

Kay purchased these beautiful woodblock prints while travelling in Japan with my grandmother many years ago. As far as I can tell, they were carefully lifted from a hand-bound book, each one has holes along one end of the page. The labels on the backs of the frames credit them to Utagawa Kunisada and date them to the mid-1800s. I have been unable to find other copies of these two prints anywhere on the internet so I can’t back the veracity of the claims, but they seem reasonable.

Imagine my shock when Leslie passed these on to me for my birthday, knowing how touched I would be, and how much I would appreciate them. All the gifts I got were incredibly thoughtful and I appreciated them all, but I was well and truly flabbergasted by these two simple but beautiful prints, due to the way they tied so many facets of the relationship between Leslie, her mother, my grandmother, and myself together so beautifully.

Outfit of the Week: Lily Furi Coordination

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After deciding to make this a regular feature, I started planning out all sorts of outfits. Seasonally appropriate outfits, special combinations for holidays, etc. And then this lily furisode arrived and all my plans flew right out the window! I couldn’t wait to do something with it. I had this really lovely warm gold fukuro obi with subtle green and pink accents from the obi bundle eons ago, and it seemed like the perfect complement to the rich green of the kimono. I also happened to have just about the perfect obidome for this kimono, a gold oval with pink lilies on it!

Unfortunately, this also reminded me how long it’s been since I tied anything other than a simple hanhaba or nagoya obi, and I ended up having to improvise a sort of large-scale cho-cho/bunko hybrid musubi. It’s not ideal, but I think it worked out alright.

Items used in this coordination