Yay! I finally finished drafting the pattern for my kimono tonight.




While I greatly respect John Marshall, and am grateful for his Make Your Own Japanese Clothes book, he could really simplify the pattern drafting element. If I get the urge someday, I'll make some sort of "appendix" for the book, showing how you can overlap the outlines of several pieces onto one pattern piece. It would have saved me so much time and effort if I'd thought of it sooner. I'd post it on the Immortal Geisha Forums or somewhere else that people who want to sew kimono get together. (BTW, if you want really authentic patterns for Japanese clothes, I would skip the oft-recommended Making Kimono and Japanese Clothes by Jenni Dobson. If I didn't have to pay postage, I would have mailed that one back to Amazon. If you want adapted clothes, I guess it's great.)

To celebrate my finishing this all-important step, I'm going to share a bunch of design sketches that show a little bit of progression from my first Tayuu idea, Leather Butterfly, to my current Jigoku Dayuu.



My first completed uchikake sketch. (An uchikake is a padded outer garment, often worn by brides and courtesans.) Early idea for the leather butterfly costume. I still like the overall balance of the design, enough to possibly make this one some day. Though I don't know exactly what I'd do with it after. I'm too old and too married for furisode-length sleeves.  The flowers would be purple, the foliage a soft sage green, the background midnight blue with a silvery white moon. In the right hand corner, you can see a tiny Tayuu/Oiran sketch. I wanted to see where the butterfly would fall if you actually wore this. Above that is a tiny, roughly life size, sketch of one of the blooms that make up those flower spikes on the uchikake. I was a little crazy about the integrated butterfly theme. Every flower, in every aspect of the costume's design was one that butterflies actually feed from. Maybe someday, I'll get an amazing patron and be able to make this one a reality, including the butterfly lifecycle hairpins near the bottom of the entry. Heck, maybe I'll be crazy rich and can fund the project myself.



Comb from the leather Tayuu. It has no teeth in the middle because it would have to fit around a leather headdress made in the shape of a Tayuu's hair. I'm forgetting the term for this hairstyle. If anyone feels like noting it in the comments, be my guest :) The maple leaves would be shades of red to burgundy (to match the uchikake below), the bridge would be red, and the wavy lines underneath would be blue to suggest water.



This is a very rough sketch of the maple uchikake I wanted to make out of garment leather with leather appliques for the hill, tree trunk and most of the leaves. This is an "expanded view" so that I could plan out how to make the branches flow over the shoulders from back to front. If you imagine that the kimono "folds" at the first horizontal line from the top, you can get an idea of the finished product. This expanded view as a design tool came from an awesome blog by a man who seems to design kimono for the kabuki stage.



Here is my idea for a sexy "kimono deconstructed," for my Sci Fi butterfly Tayuu. The kimono is really more of a halter dress with several collars inside eachother, a bare upper back and arms, detatched sleeves, and decorative cords that attach the collar to a corset that has a smooth leather cover to suggest the back of a manaita obi. I'll talk a little bit more about hair below. You can see some of my drawing through of the figure underneath the clothing. I do a lot of transparent looking sketches when I design because I need to understand how the construction would work. Communicating the sexiness of a Tayuu or Oiran to a contemporary Western audience is a bit of a challenge. Tayuu on parade, or in public, wear so many layers that they almost resemble battleships or tanks; very big and bulky. This was one of my solutions. It would have been under a more tradtional uchikake.



Here was a design sketch of how the deconstructed butterfly kimono might look. After cutting out the pattern pieces for this and pinning them together, major flaws in my plan were revealed. To get the silhouette of the the pencil sketch, the kimono would really have to become a dress. Just leaving the top back of the kimono off gave me a very silly, droopy, baggy garment that just didn't work. This led to my deciding I needed to sew at least one kimono before deconstructing them. ^_~



These are my first two sketches of oiran hair. The one on the lower right is more accurate. It is shaped very much like the wigs that young women wear when re-enacting the oiran dochuu (a procession made by high class prostitutes and their extensive entourage). At the beginning of my design process, I thought I would be making these shapes out of leather strips for a Sci Fi leather headdress.



Decorations for the bar-shaped decoration that seems to be placed underneath your forelock when it's pulled back. The flowers, another butterfly favorite, are from a really useful type of hibiscus called Kenaf. And yes, its leaves really do look like pot leaves.



Design ideas for some hexagonally shaped kanzashi (hairpins). The bottom one, with the leaves, came from the idea of having each of the front hairpins depict one stage of a butterfly's lifecycle.




Here is a more current silhouette sans kanzashi (hair pins). It comes up higher on the head. You can see her earlobes. The back pieces are a little smaller. I wanted something with a slightly softer appearance now that I know I'm going to be putting together an actual wig...with hair and everything...

Here, finally, are some honest to goodness Jigoku Dayuu (Hell Courtesan) sketches:



Hell Hair. Click on this one to blow it up big. The detail is a lot of fun. The balls on the back right hairpins have become skulls, the six to eight hair pins in the front have flame motifs, the back right hairpins have a ribcage and pelvic bone at the ends, and I might have the frontmost hair ornament (which normally looks like a bar) be shaped like a bone. I'd also like to add little articulated skeleton charms among the bira bira (These are linked fluttering pieces; the trailing bits in the picture. In this case they'll be made of shiny silver metal.) The combs in the very back will probably still have a river theme, but it will be changed to look like the river you cross to get into Japanese Buddhist hell proper.

Next up design-wise will be Jigoku Tayuu's uchikake. Traditionally, it has images of hell on it. I have a lot of different motifs in mind. I'm thinking of including Enma (the head king of the ten kings of hell). This uchikake wil not have furisode. Research has shown me that only a very young, newly launched, courtesan would have fluttering sleeves.

Hopefully my notes haven't bored you too much. I wouldn't blame you if you've just skimmed them to get the pictures. If anyone knows the name of the ornament that sits closest to the back poofs on an oiran's hair, the long horizontal one that looks like lots of tiny silver flowers, please comment here. I'm having a hard time sussing that info out. Also, I've read that Jigoku Dayuu was very popular in the nineteenth century and that there may even be a couple of kabuki plays that include her. If anyone knows what their titles are, I would be extremely grateful.

Cheers everyone. Hope you're having a wonderful weekend.