Recent project- Painting an obi, fixing katagami stencils

I am one of those really bad crafty people that have about 15 half finished projects on the go.
I lack the drive to finish things most of the time.
When something finally does get finished I consider it a major victory!

So.... Waaayyyy back in 2009 I bought three black ro obi bolts from Ryu Japan with the idea of painting them and sewing them up.
I had the obi bolts, I bought the fabric paint.
I then started working full time and my spare time went towards other projects.

And so they sat in my craft box. Year after year. Whenever I'd go into the craft box for something else I'd look at the obi bolts and go "Oh yeah! I should really do something about those".
Then when I started selling things from my collection I started to think should I sell them too? I'd had them for years and never touched them.
But I held onto them, for whatever reason.

 So finally this year when I stopped working due to the pregnancy I thought to myself  'Great, I'm going to have so much spare time to do all those little craft jobs I've been putting off for years".

HA.

Even before the baby is here I've learnt things take about 3 times longer than I originally expected.

Plus my list of half started crafts is stupidly long:
* Paint the obi bolts.
* Finish re-sizing and replacing the lining for a blue autumn kimono.
* Sew my 2 other maiko han'eri to the collar things.
* I've got a cross stitch that I've been working on since 2011.
* My mother gave me a kit for temari balls about 3 years ago that I haven't even opened and I can tell she's disappointed I haven't done them yet... :(
* I bought some beautiful katagami stencils that needed repairing. DONE!
( that was very time consuming for one of them! I think about a month of carefully glueing all the pieces to a new netting)
* Plus whatever baby projects I'd found from browsing Pintrest late at night  -_-

So there you have my "workload"!
But all is good.
* I've painted one obi bolt, just needs sewing up now.
I've started painting the second one now.
* Kimono hasn't been touched.
* han'eri: I've got all the bits of fabric cut and ready to go, just finding the motivation for some hand sewing needed.
* Cross stitch is nearly done! Which means it might be done by Christmas 2016...
* Nothing on the temari balls. Maybe when mum comes for a visit after the baby is born I'll suggest we do one each?
* Katagami stencils I'll post some pics of.
I don't have pictures of the finished result but you'll get an idea.

I'll start with the katagami:

The leaf stencil. So beautiful but as you can see badly damaged.

I still had most of the missing pieces so it was ok, but putting it back together like a puzzle was pretty hard.

Plus more bits kept falling off as I was repairing it!

I don't have a picture of the finished piece ( sorry!) but I have tested it out with a home-made rice paste resit and its works! 

I was making some bassinet sheets and I stencilled these leaves onto the fabric, let it dry then brushed a dye over the top ( I found that submerging the fabric in dye would wash off the resist as its only water based)

Then washed off the rice resit when the dye had been set.

Again, I don't have a photo sorry.

It turned out ok, I don't think I've got the technique or the consistency of the rice paste right as it wasn't as sharp as I was hoping for.

The second stencil is this simple but so very cute ume design.

I haven't tried stencilling with this one yet but it's ready to go when I've got time.

I'll have to do a separate post with the finished results.

Obi time!

This is the finished obi bolt that's awaiting being sewn up.

I had a hard time picking the secondary colour.

I had painted the silver first and was originally going to pair it with a reddish colour ( going for the traditional black, white and red scheme)

But when I'd painted up a small section to see how it looked the red was just all wrong.

I then browsed Flickr, Google and pintrest for obi inspiration and another colour scheme I saw a lot of was black, white/silver and gold!

Of course that then started the dilemma or what type of gold- bright gold or a champagne gold ( my options in the paint section.)

So again I did a little test area, I had a really hard time picking one as I think each gold looked good and gave it a different look.

I ended up going with the champagne gold.

I'm very pleased with how it's turned out, I did have to do a double coat of the gold as one coat wasn't strong enough compared to the silver.

Now to just paint the other two and sew them up!

Old kimono kitsuke! (haha lame title)

So inspiration struck again!
Although it's just gone autumn here of course this kitsuke isn't season appropriate, I'm pretty bad at that actually :/
Anyway, its still really hot here so I decided to do a ro kitsuke because I haven't done one this summer.
This kimono is one I've had for years, its ro with wisteria. Of course my wardrobe would entirely be made up of wisteria pieces if I could manage it :p
I've only worn this kimono once before, back in '09 for a staff party:

I've got a thing for ro, its such a beautiful fabric!

So here's what I came up with this time:

Sorry the photos are pretty crap, this was the best of the bunch.
Unfortunately I didn't get a clear shot of the obi area.
Again I've used my cream hakata obi, I really need to get some more, they're great!
I find that lately I've been drawn towards non-seasonal kimono pieces, perhaps because they can be worn whenever? I don't know...
Obi was tied with a biyosugata again, except this time it was really really tight! I had  to sneeze later and it was so difficult and kinda painful lol.
I'm still having trouble getting the obi to look nice and straight, also getting that "peak" at the top of the obi where it folds out, if that makes sense. Practice.... I know...