#kimonoremake

A jumper upcycled from a vintage children's kimono.

In Japan, it is called a Sukajan.

These elegant, formal kimono are being modified into contemporary fashion and they easily maintain the formality, dignity, and class.

You can google “tomesode remake” or just head to our Pinterest “Fashions from Kimono” board to be inspired.

Beautiful Japanese kimono remake.

Reversible with a patchwork of many girls' festive clothes and a patchwork of cotton Japanese hand towels.

I unstitch old Japanese kimonos and repurpose them into things I like, such as clothes and accessories. In this process, I find that there is more hand sewing involved than I expected, but I enjoy it and realise that I like hand sewing.

When I’m doing hand sewing at home, I usually listen to the radio or my favourite music. So, I’m able to enjoy my hand sewing time, but there are other reasons why I do so much hand sewing.

At first, I can’t accept the idea of sewing machine stitches showing on my kimono fabric. Kimono is normally hand-stitched. However, you cannot see any stitches on kimono, neither of right side or wrong side. That’s why it’s difficult for me to let stitches be seen on the front side of my kimono clothes.

Sewing with a machine is much faster and easier, especially for long straight lines. Still, especially when finishing a garment, seeing the sewing machine stitches on the kimono fabric is something I just can’t stand. So I try to use methods where the sewing machine stitches aren't visible on the surface fabric.

Professional tailors normally have an overlocker, which is used to finish the edges. To prevent the threads from fraying, the fabric edges are usually processed using an overlock or a zigzag stitch, but for now, I don’t have an overlocker yet. Someone like me, who doesn’t have an overlocker, can do zigzag stitch to finish the fabric edges. However, both overlock and zigzag stitch don’t look very beautiful to me. I don’t like them, even if it’s only visible on the inside of the garment. That’s why I finish the edges by hand, although it’s much more time-consuming.

There is a method called "hidden stitching" where the fabric edges are not visible even when viewed from the back of the garment. This means wrapping one edge of the seam allowance around the other and sew it, but if you use a sewing machine here, the stitches will be visible from the front of the garment. Therefore, I finish off the seam allowance with a blanket stitch by hand, so that the sewing machine stitches are not visible from the front, and the seam allowance on the back is also seamless and beautifully finished.

Another reason is that many kimonos are made of silk, which has various advantages such as being lightweight, flexible, lustrous, smooth, and warm. However, traditional silk fabrics have very fine, tightly woven threads, which do not work well with sewing machines.

Perhaps industrial sewing machines are different, but the one I have is a household sewing machine. Sewing silk fabric with a household sewing machine is not easy because the silk fabric is very slippery, or sometimes it’s too soft to sew with a sewing machine. Well, I would say that the kimono fabric doesn’t like a sewing machine! Therefore, when sewing silk kimono fabric, I first do a temporally stitching by hand and then use the sewing machine. This is another part of the process requires hand sewing.

Floral overalls remade from a Japanese girl's kimono.

One of a kind.