Today I returned to the Maneki Nekko (lucky cat) kimono and antiques shop with Sarah. We thought we should take some omiyage for the owners and our new kitsuke sensei who will teach us the art of wearing a yukata (or kitsuke) over the next few weeks.

Sarah picked me up and we bought a cake, which I then proceeded to decorate WHILST WE WERE DRIVING TO THE SHOP so we weren’t late, I think I did a fairly decent job for my first attempt at off road cake decorating:

Sarah seemed pleased with it! As did the ladies in the shop later on who ate it after the lovely lunch they cooked us of chahan and salad.

It took a while to choose a yukata, my favourite was the one I’m wearing here, but it was too small for me at my current size, all the more reason to stop eating dars and start dieting I guess. If I get to a goal weight I have resolved that this will be my reward. Now I need to set the goal and keep focused!

Diet goal=

I tried a couple of others on and managed to remember how to tie a butterfly obi knot (chocho musubi).

The end result is far from neat, so hopefully the classes will help me get to grips with it more.

I settled on this yukata in the end as it fitted well and I like the colour scheme.

I went for a beautiful purple obi in the end and got a plain woolen one for 500 yen to practise with at home, so I don’t wear out the threads in the nice one by contantly tying and retying it.

Our kitsuke teacher tried to get me to buy some getta sandles to go with the yukata, but I will most likely opt for flip flops- getta are simply too uncomfortable to walk round in. Fortunately my big Western feet kept me from having to make excuses as none in the shop would fit me anyway.

Here are some images from the rest of the shop, it really is amazing, I have spent about 6 hours there over the last 2 days and could easily spend far longer rooting through all of the amazing stuff they have tucked away there. I’m so glad Sarah found this place and chose to share it with me!

My favourite pattern was on a child’s kimono, if only they had my size!

I’ve been working on a far bigger temari today and made a kimekomi ball last night. The kimekomi is very much a trial and looks OK from a distance, but is messy and uneven up close. I quite like the look of kimekomi, but they don’t seem to have the same long tradition and symbolic meaning as temari, so I don’t find them quite as intriguing in terms of making work. I thought I’d give it a go and see if I could learn a bit through making it, which I feel I did, a second attempt would be neater and more even no doubt.

About ten days ago I learnt how to tie a Turk’s Head knot using instructions I’d found online. There are mistakes in mine but I’m generally pleased with the result. Here’s the instructions I used and pictures of how I did it using stuff I had in the house:

I made the 7x16 knot here, the video here shows you how to do it yourself. I made some other knots too:

This is a Pan Chang knot, which is a Chinese knot based on the Buddhist Great Endless Knot I talked about previously, there’s one in a Chinese restaurant at the shopping mall and the others are from my own attempt at home.

I had to unwrap my latest temari and start over as it was getting so enormous, but still not round. It’s approximately spherical now, it’s been wound in 150m paper string, about 550m acrylic yarn, 75m crochet cotton and about 300m black sewing cotton to get it to the sphere it now is. My wrists hurt…

Here’s my progress on the second in the Reader series so far:

I’m trying to decide what design to put on it. I was thinking about a Shinto TomoeThat looks something like this:

Getting flat designs onto curved surfaces, I have learnt through my last temari, which sits beside me still unfinished, is a complex and frustrating process. I’m going to try and keep this one simple, it’s too unwieldy to try and do something really complex.

Here’s my progress so far on my unfinished second temari, the first in the Reader series I’m making at the moment (the one with the blue star below was just a practise attempt at technique and didn’t contain anything other than a balled-up plastic bag).

Today Sarah drove me to a kimono shop she’d been in. I’d told her about my ideas and how much I wanted to take kimono classes, when I asked they said they had them and called the teacher. She came in and we got to talk to her for ages, everyone’s really kind there. They gave us tea and loads of sweets to eat! Sarah and I are going to take 3 classes together in how to put on yukata over the next few weekends, apparently after 9 hours we should be able to do it! I want to learn much more complex knots and kimono dressing techniques, particularly about the symbolism behind everything. Hopefully as we go along we’ll be able to get a lot of really valuable insight into the whole culture, the ladies all seem really pleased that we want to learn about it and, like everyone I’ve asked, has commented that almost no Japanese women can do the obi knots nowadays.

Sarah checking out the kimonos.

The shop is really incredible, we’re going back tomorrow and I’m going to buy a second hand yukata to wear in the classes, all of the sleeves are too short for my long Western arms, so we need to try and find one they can alter for me! Here are a couple of pictures I took. I think Sarah and I will hopefully spend a lot of time hanging out with the lovely ladies that work there.

I’m going to get some sleep so I can hunt out the perfect yukata and obi tomorrow, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather spend my day off doing, even the onsen can wait for this!

Here are pictures from the construction of the other temari I posted about before, this was my first attempt:

The last few weeks I’ve been thinking about problems and knots. I read some Buddhist scolar saying that we cling to our problems because we fear we will lose our identity without them, which I agree with to a large extent. As usual, knowledge without application does not bring about change. I don’t know how to apply this knowledge to loosen the vice grip.

I’ve been making some work though, filling my sketchbook with increasingly complex knots. Researching Shinto knots, lucky Buddhist knots that symbolise the endless continuum of things and the way in which everything is interconnected. 

I’ve also been making some temari. They function as tokens of friendship, but my temari are a little different. Traditionally a bell of something similar is placed in the centre of the ball before the layers are wrapped. I felt like my head was in knots, that everything was a tangle, so I wrapped over letters I have written but feel it would be better not to send my friends. That the act of friendship in making them is by trying to bury those thoughts, the gift is silence.

It’s better to wrap over the fear and destroy something in order to create something new. The fear in those letters is like the dirt in a pearl.

I want to make something to do with kimono obi knots too, to think about how women bind themselves figuratively and literally. I think the proposition that women are in love with inequality, because it allows them to be angry and insist on more, whilst still having doors held open for them and cheques picked up at restaurants is an interesting one. An unequal position, it could be argued, is actually preferable to equality, because it affords us almost all of the perks of equality, with none of the responsibilities, it allows us to pick and choose what aspects of sexism we want to cling to and call ‘chivalry’ or ‘romance’, to exploit our sex appeal and fragility to our own ends, whilst refusing to accept that those traits exist when feel like it. We are constantly the underdog, allowed to be perpetually angry, to move the rules and goal poasts. Is something moderately less than equality so full of perks that it leaves us in a better position? It certainly allows us to be tempestuous and fickle.

I think the way in which we bind ourselves to this is interesting, how we can calculate the odds and manipulate a lazy approximation of equality to live out. Apparently quite a lot of young men are rightly livid about this attitude in the young women they see around them.

I’ve been looking more into knots. I like that they are complicated but ordered. Today I made the Turk’s Head knot shown in the picture below, I think they look very beautiful flattened out.

I’m working on another temari, although progress is slow and its taken me ages to get the design I wanted plotted out, I think I’m getting there though.

Tomorrow is my last day off before I start work properly. I think I should still have quite a bit of time to make stuff, there’s nothing else to do around here, so I’m likely to be staying in almost every evening anyway. I hope to finish the temari tomorrow.

My ideas have been centred around The Glorious Endless Knot (aka The Auspicious Knot) in Buddhist symbolism, which represents the interlinked nature of everything, the endless cycle and lots of other Buddhist ideas of that nature. I thought it was interesting, the idea of something problematic being considered a boon. That without suffering we would not be able to grow and transcend suffering.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the proposition that problems are what we use to define ourselves as unique, that without them our subjective edges would be blurred and hazy, that we love them because they allow us to feel special and allow us to quickly dismiss failure and attribute blame, absolving ourselves of full responsibility for anything that didn’t turn out as we had hoped. I don’t know if this is genuinely what’s going on with me or anyone else, but I find it intriguing to puzzle over the idea that the very things we think are holding us back are the things that stop us from collapsing altogether.

I’ve been thinking a lot about knots the last few days…
I love how the temari become more perfect the more confused and chaotic they are, as you wrap more and more the sphere perfects. The way the order emerges from the chaos, or maybe that spheres are the most formless of forms, just blobs, the closest we can come to holding chaos.
Each layer covers the last and nobody knows what’s hidden inside. I’ve always liked an element of secrecy.
I read somewhere recently that someone said they think the reason we cling to problems is because we use them to define our personalities and fear we would lose what makes us unique without them. This made me think of how seductive problems are and excuses.
Then I found this Buddhist symbol; the glorious knot, that symbolizes how everything is interlinked. It made me wonder if we secretly love our problems because they make excuses for us and alleviate us of guilt by providing some extenuating circumstances as to why we didn’t do what we should have, achieve our potential, follow our morals, succeed.
I’ve been thinking about some Buddhist concepts quite a lot over the past couple of weeks, about the idea that everything is nothing. And this week, in relation to this work, about suffering.