After like ten months, this braid is finally complete. Two ends of silk lace-weight yarn per tama in a 25-tama 3/3 twill braid. Yikes. I did a bunch of braids while this waited on the takadai, but I finally powered through it and cleared the takadai for new projects.
Anyway, it’s like 75 inches of braid, 3/8 of an inch wide.
Finally getting around to my annual post of all the music I bought during the year. Much of the year was concerned with catching up on the output of old friends The Orb, and Eric Johnson. The Orb and Sigur Ros released new albums, so there’s that.
The Orb
Eric Johnson
Sigur Ros
Not a lot of music purchases overall. I should get into some new bands. Old friends Zombi are releasing a new album in a couple of months. That should be fun.
With the Pandemic lightening up enough for the SCA to start having regular events once again, I decided to restart some of my garb-making activities. The last new white under-kosode I made was way back in 2020. Anyway, I finished this kosode back in mid-December. It is entirely white linen, some very nice white linen I purchased at Pennsic 50.
There’s nothing much special to this kosode, other than it conforms a little better to what we now think a kosode should be. The sleeves are almost entirely attached to the body. The overlaps are still “old-style”, but I’ll work on that for the next one.
Painted silk banners are one of the things I do in the SCA. This past weekend there was an SCA event where there were four elevations, and I made banners for three of the four.
Back in the summer, I made this banner for Oribe Tsukime. One cool thing about this banner is that I painted the design on in water-based resist, then painted purple around it. Normally, I would start with purple fabric and paint the design on in white, or do a gutta resist around the design and flood the outside area with color, but the detail on the iris was too fine for that method.
For these two banners, I was able to use the normal method of applying a black gutta resist and fill the interiors of the designs with paint. Doing the layout and resist for the gurges on Sumayya’s banner was quite a lot of work, but I like how it came out. Thank you Markus for registering a design that was significantly less work to paint than most people’s. Hara did the edging and the braids for these two banners, so I could focus on other projects.
One of our friends in the SCA, Oribe Tsukime, received a writ for elevation to the Order of the Laurel. The writ was issued back in the Spring, but she was not able to have her actual elevation until this past weekend. This gave me plenty of time to make these white silk tabi for her to wear as part of her elevation garb.
This was the first time I had ever made tabi for another person, the first time I had made tabi in a few years, and the process was complicated by Tsukime living somewhat far from my home. Footwear is always difficult to fit, and trying to do it by sending prototypes back and forth in the mail took a few months.
I was able to complete this project with days to spare, however, and she wore them during her vigil and elevation ceremony. They are all fine silk left over from the uenohakama project, sewn by hand with white silk thread. I don’t know how long they will last, and they probably never can be washed, but I was asked to make them and they were ready in time, so I am happy.
