Year: 2019

Hiatus Update

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I just wanted to post a quick update. I’m still living in the guest room, still blocking access to my kimono. I’m also just sort of exhausted emotionally, dealing with all this flood stuff. However, my bedroom is in the process of being emptied out and renovations should start on Monday! My birthday is this coming weekend and honestly this progress is just about the best gift I could have received. Hopefully I’ll be back at full energy, with free time and unfettered access to my collection, within a few weeks!

Until then, thank you for your continued patience and support.  😀

Mini-Hiatus

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Several days ago, Montreal experienced an unusually heavy rain fall. Unfortunately, when that happened, my room (which is in the basement of a big old house) flooded, leaving everything down there in several inches of standing water.

Thankfully my kimono collection does not reside in my bedroom, or this entry would be a lot harder to write. However, all my free time for the foreseeable future is going to be devoted to flood cleanup, and the room where the kimono are stored is also our guest room which is where I’m currently sleeping. With the sofa-bed unfolded it’s impossible for me to get to my collection.

What this means is that there likely won’t be new entries for a few weeks. I sincerely apologise, and promise I’ll be back in full force as soon as I can! Thank you for understanding.

Pumpkin Spice & Everything Nice

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As much as people love to mock the trend of pumpkin spice everything, there’s a reason it’s so popular. It’s comforting and familiar and warming, and utterly perfect for this time of year. So when this kimono arrived in the mail, I knew I had to do an orangey-peach monochrome look with it, despite the orchid motifs being quite out of season.

The kimono is stunning; big blousy cattleya orchids in white and all shades of orange. They’re outlined in black in such a way that they feel like ink drawings. I don’t have a single other kimono painted in quite this style, and I freaking love it. I paired it up with the orange and white hakata side of one of my favourite chuuya obi, some peach accessories, and a new obidome I got recently. It’s a little ivory phoenix, and I love the final little punch of white it adds to the whole ensemble. I didn’t use a decorative haneri because I liked how the plain white echoed the big white orchids of the kimono. Overall, I’m really really happy with how this one turned out.

If these photos look a little off to you, I apologise. Firstly, my camera was giving me grief and I ended up taking these with my phone, and on top of that, the peach base colour of the kimono is nearly impossible to capture properly. I tried to do my best to balance everything but in reality the peach is more vibrant and the obi is much more orange, almost carrot-like and a perfect match to the orange in the kimono’s designs.

Items used in this coordination

Fall’s Bounty Ikebana

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I guess all that complaining about how summer was sticking around actually accomplished something, because it’s wonderfully crisp and cool out now. It seemed like a good time to share this last of the triad I created from that one big bundle of flowers my mum brought home a while back.

The lilies and the greenery forming the horizontal grounding of the arrangement harken back to the end of summer, while the carnations and chrysanthemums scream autumn to me. Unfortunately the piece does end up feeling a little cluttered, in retrospect, and I might have been better off just foregoing the orange lilies entirely. Oh well, you live and you learn, right?

I’d also like to take a moment to thank any regular readers for their patience. My schedule at work and life in general have been a little out of whack for the past few weeks and I’ve found it hard to devote time to blogging. But things are back to normal now, so I should be back to two entries a week or so.

Back to Basics

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I’ve been doing a lot of fancy and non-traditional kitsuke lately, and was itching to get back to kimono basics, if you will. Just an elegant, simple coordination. No fuss, no muss. I also realised I’ve been sticking to more Western colour coordinations, doing things that look “right” in my head and not necessarily keeping kimono colour rules in mind.

With that at the forefront of my mind, I decided it was high time I coordinate this beautiful pale pink nagoya obi I got earlier this summer. My original instinct was to stick with pastels, but I pushed through and paired it with this rich blue houmongi instead. I love the contrast, and the soft genteel obi pairs so well with the very delicate shading on the botan of the kimono. Red and blue accessories helped pull it all together cohesively.

My next thought for this obi is a black-based kimono. I really love how it pops against darker, richer colours. It’s technically not formal enough for kurotomesode, but because it’s got a metallic pearly-silver sheen to it, I think I can make it work! Maybe I should do that next week. Less folding to do if I use the same obi two outfits in a row 😉

Items used in this coordination