My first snow in the USA

When I found out that we will be moving to New Mexico, I absolutely did not expect to see more snow than I did in England. Yup, that's right! We got snow this weekend! It probably will be gone in a week and we will see no more, but still!

Of course I had to use this opportunity to take photos in the snow. I wanted to wear something very bright, so I found my much-neglected red komon (but it looks like iromuji from far away) and paired it up with one of my recent purchases. I've been looking for an excuse to wear this chuya obi for a while now, and I thought it would stand out nicely against the red. Unfortunately I don't really have anything else blue in the right seasonality, or even close to it, so I went with the next best thing - this purplish haori. I also thought of wearing one of my blue hats, but I just really wanted to wear this red beret.

The haori has some mint leaves designs on it, so I figured that would be the color of my accessories. The gloves are very close in shade to the green on the haori, but the obiage is not the same shade. It is actually a light blue, but it looks very similar in the photos. I figured that might happen, as the same thing happened in my photos before.

At one point I slipped and almost fell in the snow.

One thing I wish I would have done differently is wear a different lipstick. I thought I would wear some pink for a change, but in the photos it looks like I have no lipstick whatsoever. I know it's a little thing, but little things like that are the ones that literally make or break a photo.

As always, you can see the rest of the photos in my Facebook album.

~ Lyuba

How I store my obiage

Few weeks ago Naomi showed me a blog post about vintage gloves storage, so we immediately started looking for these storage containers to buy for our gloves and possibly for our obiage. After looking at many different version, we eventually settled on these ones, as they seemed to be the most sturdy of the bunch.

Well, after organized my obiage AND gloves, I'm proud to say that these containers work for both, but you will need to fold your obiage quite a bit to make it fit.

New life for an unwearable obi

Hello Everyone, 

A while back I won this gorgeous obi for very cheap, but at the time I didn't realize WHY it was so cheap. You can see below the reason why no one else bid on it. I wasn't upset though, because I saw the potential for a nice tsuke obi. 

Not only was the bottom of the obi in a completely unwearable condition, but there were tiny little holes everywhere on the front. Luckily for me, the obi has the same design on both sides, and the other side was in perfect condition! All I had to do was iron out the fold and make the drum part from the good size.

The first thing I did was cut the bottom so I could shorten the stiffener, then fold the fabric. It made the end understandably shorter and a little unbalanced in terms of the design (you can see it in the finished photo), but I'm not bothered by that.

Since it's a tsuke obi, there were lots of hidden spots where I can cut off some fabric to cover the holes in the obi.

By the way, I decided to do it all by hand because sewing by hand is very relaxing for me. It's much faster to do it with a sewing machine.

Here is the back side so you can see how I constructed the tsuke obi. It's actually really easy to do, and I really should stop procrastinating and convert some of the other obi I have.