Category: Ensembles

Basho, bunnies, and a buzz cut!

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Hello! I’m back, sort of! As some of you know, I had a cranial decompression back in April. I won’t elaborate because it’s a bit creepy and involves my brain meats, but feel free to ask me about if you are curious. Suffice to say it went very well, and my health is improving in leaps and bounds, but until recently I have not had the energy or stamina for kimono.

Earlier this week, Katsura Sunshine, the only foreign rakugo performer in the world, was on the local news discussing his upcoming performance at the Montreal Botanical Gardens Japanese cultural weekend. Queue several days of me getting very excited, planning an outfit, and being generally annoying.

One thing I was certain of, I wanted to wear my hakama. I’m still quite a bit heavier than I used to be, I tire easily, and I was going to be tromping around in a garden. The hakama would cover a multitude of sins. I then decided that since I’d be surrounded in foliage, it would be an excellent opportunity to wear the bizarre basho-leaf houmongi I bought eons ago and never had the chance to coordinate. I realised my bunny geta matched the colours in the houmongi quite nicely, so I went with a bunny haneri to tie things together. I was so excited. The whole outfit has a very soft/girly feel to me, all in shades of pink and purple with pale blue accents, so I decided to wear my pink lace tabi too.

This morning rolls around, dark and drizzling. I started having misgivings about going, but I figured it would be a good excuse to get out of the house. Until I checked ticket prices. It’s nearly thirty dollars a person to enter the Botanical Gardens, plus an estimated $15 to $20 for an afternoon’s parking. My father was going to accompany me, since I am not allowed to drive and was not up to spending an hour on the subway in a kimono. That would have been quite an expense, only to end up getting rained on.

Undaunted, I decided to put the outfit on anyway and take some photos in the yard of my lovely next-door neighbours. Their pear tree is bearing fruit, and was a great place to pose. All in all, I’m glad I decided to get dressed. It was wonderful for my morale.

Kimono and buzz cut, an excellent combination! You can see the charming hole in my head here, or at least what’s left of it… Thanks for looking! Hopefully now that I am starting to feel less sick all the time, I will be posting somewhat regularly again.

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Kimono fun at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

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Several weeks ago, the Montreal-based members of the Immortal Geisha forums decided to have a little meetup at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. We had a blast and took a ton of photos. I would have posted them sooner, but I was admitted to the Montreal Neurological Institute on fairly short notice for a decompressive craniectomy to attempt to correct my Chiari malformation. It’s only recently that I’ve felt well enough to edit and upload the photos. Hopefully once I am fully recovered I will have a lot more energy, lose a fair bit of retained water-weight, and be much more inclined to wear kimono frequently!

Entirely unintentionally, we ended up dressing in three very different styles. Mischie wore a lovely houmongi and fukuro obi with a coordinating haori in a very elegant traditional style, Ame wore an adorable yukata dressed as kimono, in a sweet modern style, and I (due to a combination of weight-gain and a need to be more comfortable), wore a modern poly kimono hiked up to mini-dress hime style, with leggings underneath. I think we did a fantastic job of showing a variety and diversity of kimono fashion.

I took so many photos, I’ve set up a mini-gallery rather than make this page enormous. 🙂 Feel free to browse!

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Quiet afternoon kitsuke time

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I know I have not been posting in this blog anywhere near as frequently as I used to, and I apologise. However, yesterday I got an overwhelming urge to coordinate a kimono I’d never worn before, and decided to pair it with an obi I’ve also never worn before.

The kimono is a half-lined synthetic piece with tiny white fans in a sort of gradient pattern. I won it at the Astoria street fair in NYC in the summer of 2012, and it’s been sitting in an armoire ever since. I decided to pair it with a bright red faux-shibori obi I got from Ame years ago, and couldn’t resist using my ubiquitous lemon-yellow shibori obiage and hakata obijime.

Something about the combination of tiny patterns felt a bit retro to me, and I’ve been obsessively reading the Sano Ichiro series of novels by Laura Joh Rowland lately, so I decided to aim for a bit of an Edo-style silhouette, tying my obi much lower than usual and going for a more pigeon-shaped and natural-looking bust. I’m not sure how well it succeeded, but it was very comfortable! To emphasize the period feel, I had on a pair of black geta with pinstriped hanao, but they got cut off in the photos. Haha. Whoops!

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Whisky-a-go-go

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Well, would you look at that? I’m not actually dead! Summer here was insufferably hot and damp, intolerable kimono weather, and my health hasn’t been great lately. I’ve been less than motivated to do anything kimono-related recently, but I’d been kind of itching to wear this particular blue tsukesage since it arrived.

The perfect opportunity showed up when I bought tickets to the Montreal Pipes and Drums Whisky-Tasting fundraiser. At first, it might seem a bit incongruous to wear a kimono to a decidedly Scottish event, but the Quartermaster for the band is my friend Nick, who shares and encourages my silly kimono enthusiasm. He specifically requested I wear kimono, and who was I to say no? Initially I’d wanted to wear my tartan komon, figuring it would be much more appropriate, but it’s too narrow in the hips to comfortably wear out to an event, especially one where I’d be sitting in a western-style chair at a tiny bar table. So I finally got to bust out this blue beauty.

Inevitably, I got a few “what are you wearing?” and “I like your costume!” comments, but the response was overwhelmingly positive nonetheless. I think the best question I got was from the (very attractive) bouncer at the venue, who came up and said “Can I ask you a question?”. I cringed, expecting the usual “what is that?” or “geesha girl” type question, but instead, he said “Do they have a Japanese Whisky back there or something?” which made me smile.

Anyway, I’m rambling a bit. Here are the pictures! The angle of these ones is a bit funny, since my tripod attachment is MIA so my father kindly held the camera for me.

It wouldn’t be a Kimono Tsuki entry without a visit from my two favourite furry photobombers, now would it?

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The Outfit IG Built

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So as most of you know, I am a moderator over at the Immortal Geisha webforums. I do this as a labour of love, not expecting anything in return. However, every so often, the kind and wonderful community of forum members there will flabbergast me with beautiful gifts. This year marks the incredible ten-year anniversary of the forum, and in thanks, Naomi and the members secretly arranged for the moderators to get incredibly generous gift certificates with which to buy kimono.

I’d been eyeing this particular synthetic komon for a while, mainly because I thought it would coordinate perfectly with my moorish arches nagoya obi, which, until now, I’d been unable to wear. That obi was also a gift from a forum member, so it seems incredibly fitting that not only did I get to wear them together, but they look absolutely perfect together. The kimono itself is quite a strange colour; the sale photos looked grey, in indoor lighting it looks navy blue, and in sunlight it looks almost purple. Thankfully, all three of those permutations happen to look fantastic with the brick-rust colour of the obi, and the cyan accents are a near-perfect match. The lining of the kimono is even a similar rusty colour to the obi.

I paired it up with my well-loved orange and blue shibori obiage and coordinating hakata obijime, and an awesome spade obidome from ChidoriyaWorld. I thought the spade shape mirrored the arches on the obi quite nicely. My father and I headed off to the park near my house to take pictures, and we were treated to perfect weather.

We also had company in the form of this silly little squirrel, who was carrying around a napkin. Not kimono-related, but too cute not to share!

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