Sep. 3rd, 2011

gurdymonkey: (easy)
I've been thinking I wanted to do the kasane known as "yuki no shita" for some time. I now have an excuse to do it for Twelfth Night, so I went off to check out a fabric store in San Francisco. I came home with enough silk to make a new hitoe. (I hate my old one, it's too drapy and the sleeves never hang right.)

For reference, we have the descriptions and color charts at http://www.sengokudaimyo.com/garb/garb.ch14.html
The hitoe color reads as a sprucy green on my monitor.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/crimsongriffin/3014879215/ shows the kasane as displayed in the Kyoto Costume Museum, with a bold green for the hitoe layer. Dalby's Kimono: Fashioning Culture shows the hitoe for this kasane as "blue green", almost teal.

My conundrum? The silk I scored for $9.99 at Fabrix is a much lighter shade. [image]
I pounced on it for the price as it's beautifully un-slubby and I figured I could overdye it if I like.  The problem, The bag was on the car seat with the color winking at the corner of my eye all the way home and it's beautiful.

Yuki no shita means "beneath the snow," and is supposed to evoke plum blossoms and the coming of spring.

To dye and conform or to leave it as is? I can't decide!
*******************************************

Other than that, the weekend is off to a good start. Duchess Tamsin contacted me this week about getting together for a celebratory dinner and turned up on my doorstep last night with an elegant little shopping bag containing a tin of ceremony grade matcha and wagashi, and an offer to introduce me to another friend who does tea and gives lessons in San Francisco. If we can come to an arrangement that will not kill my budget, I would love to do this.

We had dinner at Dragon Rouge here in Alameda. Yummy, yummy Vietnamese food in a bustling bistro/bar setting. And lychee sangria! We ordered several things to share and it was all good.

With the kasane conundrum comes the need for silk, hence the field trip into SF, having surfed the web and found Fabrix listed. As their website hinted at cheap silk, I figured I'd check it out, then maybe go up to Dharma in San Rafael if it didn't pan out. The place is not as much a claustrophobe's nightmare as that place down in San Jose that makes me twitch. Found the silks right away at $9.99/yard for most of them. Would've bought more white in the weight of that green if they had it, but they were down to a yard. That's enough to get started with - my budget could stand to do this project in stages and I've got a couple months to spread it out over anyway. The proprietor said they expected more silks in this afternoon, and they get things in waves, so it's definitely worth checking back.

Detoured through Japantown, found some small airtight tea tins at Soko that'll be a nice addition to my camp kitchen. Still out of tayaki irons though. Bought myself two pieces of mochi at Benkyodo for dessert, having finally figured out where they were. Been walking past it for years and never noticed it. Found a book on Shinran at Kinokuniya that looked informative - I figure Saionji would've probably been of the Jodo Shin sect and it would be nice to know more about it in detail.

Lunch now....
gurdymonkey: (thought)
(Referring to the Laurus nobilis or Bay Laurel tree.)  Yet there are laurel wreaths on these sake barrels. As is typical when the universe is messing with me, I thought it would make a nice photographic subject and I didn't even notice the laurel wreaths until I uploaded the photos to my laptop.



(Not that I can read Japanese, but I can compare images.) Further research indicates these kagami biraki, spotted outside a restaurant in Japantown, are the product of Gekkeikan, USA, whose logo features a gold laurel wreath. 


However, there is a shrub (wondering now if it's prickly and hard to eradicate), Aucuba japonica which is indigenous to Japan and China, that is sometimes referred to as "Japanese laurel," "spotted laurel" or "Gold Dust Plant." This last refers to yellow or gold variegations on the leaves. (OK, not so much prickly, but appears hardy if not ineradicable.)

Who knew....

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