Unpicked

[dianavilliers]

Kimono are fundamentally simple, medieval garments, all straight lines and incredibly conservative of what would have been very expensive fabric, designed to be unpicked and remade to hide wear and tear. Fabric intended for kimono is only 35cm wide and comes in rolls of about 9 metres in length - sufficient for one kimono.
Here you can see the minimal cutting done to make the garment. From left to right there are pieces of the collar, the sleeves, and the two long pieces that formed the body - they fold at the shoulders and have a small slit for the neck hole. Excess fabric is not cut off - it is folded into the seam allowances and conserved for future use (by me!).

I'm 99% certain this one is silk - I wasn't sure when I bought it, but after snipping a bit for a burn test I'm convinced. I'm using it for my corset and I'm not going to be nearly as conservative as the original tailor, as I want the pattern to be in sensible places on the finished piece. This is one potential layout, but I think I can do better and only use the collar and sleeve pieces. The layout will stay on my floor for about a week before I get up the nerve to put scissors to fabric.

In closely related news, the boning and busk arrived today. Spiral steel boning, mostly. It's quite attractive in it's own right, and more flexible than I thought it would be.