...aaand of course it was snowing. Nothing to it, time to dig out a woolen kimono that could both battle the cold and not give a damn about the snow.
I'm a huge fan of Strawberry Kimono so this time I decided to try something she can pull off pretty flawlessly: tying the kimono shorter. It looks really elegant when she does it but alas I'm still going to have to practice it a bit. I do like the silhouette and how the shorter hem gives a bit of a 40's flair to the coord though.
Backside. That obi is super colourful and it's been ages since I last tried a "crazy" kitsuke, so I decided to just go all-out with it.
Snowy garden!
Hahah I walked a small path into the fresh snow, running back and forth between the posing place and my camera (the trials of self-timer and all).
Later in the day it was time to go hang out with some gal pals at the conveyor belt sushi restaurant downtown. By the way, Icelandic sushi has totally ruined sushi for me in most countries, because although the combinations that the local chefs come up with are unusual and occasionally just plain weird-why-would-you-do-this, there's no beating the taste of super fresh fish!
Besides sometimes those unusual taste combinations actually work brilliantly.
Late August and early September are ideal for kimono wearing over here. There are other times as well, but this is the time of the year when the air turns crisp and cold but the autumn storms have not yet began (they usually arrive en masse around October/November). Multilayered kitsuke time!
Starting with the simplest one. I'm in love with this kimono, it's so cheerful and still makes me think of Moomins and the art of Tove Jansson.
Plus that daruma obi is an eternal favourite, though I don't wear it that often because it's old and I'm afraid of damaging it.
Then for the complicated ones. Btw I love this sleeve length for kimono: not furisode-long but longer than usual kimono. You can compare to the one above.
This time I got an idea of trying a bonnet and a cape with the kitsuke based on an art piece that I once saw floating around Tumblr and lost almost immediately. It also used glasses, hence, well, glasses.
This is how the cape looks at the back. I like how it imitates the swoop of a kimono neckline.
Sorry about the poor quality of the photos by the way. It was a dark day and my old camera could not handle it. Perhaps I'll one day have a proper photoshoot done with these ideas...
Detail shot of the front.
A mirror detail shot (that's why everything suddenly switched sides in the coord, it's all just mirrored) that also shows the hairstyle.
But then I also thought of wearing a haori instead of the cape. This is the one that I bought thinking it had short sleeves but found out that the sleeves had just been shortened and took them back out into their original shape. I also love how long the haori is, most only come you your hips but this one's knee-length.
Plus I like the bold pattern in it. It fits well with the plaid.
Detail!selfie with our driftwood garden decoration trolls!
And a blooper pic to finish with. I'm deadly afraid of anything that flies and can sting so a bee/hornet/wasp can easily get all my attention no matter what else I'm doing at the moment. :D
Look at the evil gleam in its tiny eyes. Is it drooling? O_O
Anyway, I sat by the pond while waiting for the SO and this little fella immediately got interested in me. Sorry friend, I have no bread crumbs!
It was such a beautiful day too. I love this one area downtown with its large, old-fashioned houses and narrow roads and walkways. I wouldn't exactly want to live there - the houses are so large that me + my sadly careless and lazy housekeeping ability would never keep them in condition. Btw this blue and white building is a motel/bed&breakfast if I don't remember wrong.
This marks the hotel Hilda. I'm just sad it's broken so thoroughly, it's hard to say what kind of a scene it used to portray... a small-ish boat and... what?
That has to be the tiniest (and happiest) wall-peepee of Reykjavík. XD
And! I finally got my newest kimono + obi + obiage! Of course I had to immediately try it on and in two different kitsuke. Don't expect anything fancy though, this is just me boinking around in the garden to try on colour combos. :D
This is the obi + obiage, before we get to the kitsuke photos. That obi is super cute! It might actually be a little too cute for my age but I'll find a way of wearing it anyway because I'm a little bit in love with it. Maybe I'll dress up some of my younger friends, then I could definitely use it!
It's hard to photograph but the obiage has a gradient colour, making it very versatile in usage. It also has a pattern that I didn't even pay attention to when I bought it, which is charming.
Ok then... time for some side-by-side comparisons. Hahaha I pose almost identically in both! Should probably think up some new poses, actually, I have a bad case of always-poses-the-same-way.
The kimono is lovely and (as you may have heard before) stripes are my one great weakness. I kept eyeing it on Japanese Art & Design* for ages, going between the "want it but don't exactly need it" until a friend said something dangerous:
"It has a Moomin-like feel to it."
BAM my prudence was gone.
By the way, it's always so difficult taking kimono photos outdoors. Indoors is too dim though, so I don't exactly have many choices, and when I go out I can select between two options if I'm taking the photos with a self-timer: the garden or the wall beside the door. The wall is somewhat ugly and plain as a backdrop, but the garden...
...is windy.
I'm not trying to show my ankle in that one picture, I'm hearing the wind pick up on the side. :D There's a hedge that separates our backyard from the neighbour's and it makes a really obvious hhhhhssssSSSSSHHHHHH-noise when an air blast is on its way.
Just so if you wondered why I always look like I'm holding my clothes together as I pose. I'm really doing that.
Time for front details! First the warmer colour combo tied in a more relaxed style...
Then the stark one tied sharper, and the hattifattener obidome that had to be included in this for obvious reasons.
* I can warmly recommend Japanese Art & Design (also known as Japanese Antiques) for buying second-hand kimono and kimono accessories. They have a very good quality/price range, ship immediately and are very pleasant to deal with. It says something that their feedback is almost entirely positive, and that the negative feedback has been left by two customers only (one of them spammed the hell out of their feedback after buying over a hundred items, most of which were on the cheap end of the scale). Keep in mind that if an item costs close to nothing there's a reason for it, look at all of the detail shots before deciding on whether you want to buy the item. Regardless, their feedback is still 99,7% positive and that's also for a reason.
This shop is one of the sellers that lists a very thorough photographic evidence of possible damage so you really do get to see what you're buying. Here's a good example of how they list their items: a light blue iromuji: damage is mentioned and photographed, also damage that won't be seen at all when wearing the item. The exact colour is shown as closely as possible as well.
Lolita Blog Carnival -time guys! The theme is as title says and I decided to get a little ambitious about it, although to be honest these coords are more flower-influenced than -themed. Now bear with me for a bit, I'm going to ramble a bit a lot in this post, and this may be only part 1 of the flower series, because a week is only so long and I didn't manage to finish my even-ambitiouser sewing projects. To keep things more interesting I went for a different lolita style for each entry (and if there'll be that part 2 I'll continue this theme as well).
This is my SO's favourite flower, the sea mayweed. It grows in huge groups like the one above and survives in amazingly bad conditions, namely the harsh sea-side weather. Icelanders have traditionally used this flower as a herb tea ingredient: it has a faintly sweet taste that reminds of chamomile, but is not as overpowering.
This also links to my grandparents via another flower that resembles Baldursbrá, the oxeye daisy. Icelanders call it Freyjubrá, over here both flowers are connected to the Norse Gods. Here's a ghost story about the oxeye daisy that happened in my own family.
Daisies were my grandmother's favourite flowers. They grew in small clumps at her and grandpa's summer cottage but alas, on the lawn, and grandpa didn't see a point of going around them when he mowed the lawn. Therefore grandma got some heavy rocks out of the lake and made a small circle around one group of daisies, and since grandpa also didn't see a point of going to the trouble of removing the rocks (which would have been a rather spiteful act anyway) he let them be. This is why the well-mowed lawn had a tiny bush of daisies growing on it.
Grandma died at fairly young age. After her death mowing down any daisies was strictly banned by grandpa at the cottage and this habit took on so well that I still can't quite bring myself to go over the daisies, now that grandpa's gone as well, though they grow wider every year and have by now taken over a tenth of the lawn. Whenever you start the lawn mower you get this feeling of being watched - a feeling very common from my childhood days when grandpa stood by the lake to keep an eye on the grandchildren swimming there, especially my somewhat unruly cousin - and here's another thing about the summer cottage, it's haunted.
Furniture moves on its own. Once when we were staying at the cottage I told the SO stories of things falling out of the shelves, the food cupboard emptying itself out entirely in one big crash, car keys going missing and being found in a jar of jam in the fridge without anyone knowing how they got there (there were people in the room the whole time and no one went to the fridge), things like that, that always coincided when someone spoke of doing something that grandpa had disapproved of while he had been alive. I then made a silly comment on how grandpa would probably do something similar if he didn't approve of the SO.
A moment later we noticed one of the chairs had turned 180° around. I take it that this was grandpa's joke, because when he REALLY disapproves things go flying. Nevertheless I've made a decision to never ask him for any kind of signs of his presence ever again.
My mother's favourite flower that's always found in several colours in her garden, the above colour combination seems to be the one that's most to her liking (although when my mother's concerned all violas/violets are awesome). When I get my own garden I'm going to reserve a bed for these little pretties!
My mother's every bit a gardener's daughter, so most of my childhood memories have her invariably either standing in the kitchen or rummaging in the garden. To this day I can't properly think of any place as my home if it doesn't have potted plants because our homes have always been full of them, and by full I mean they cover most horizontal spaces and hang from the ceiling as well. Not to mention I can at any time picture what my mum's hands look like with dirt all over them, and pair her gardening positions with a matching plant.
Crouching down - violets, water lilies. Kneeling, any plant smaller than a violet. A yoga-posture like knees-straight + butt-up = strawberries, potatoes. Mildly bent in a way that makes your back hate you afterwards - planting a tree, cleaning the decorative pool, picking red currants. Black currants are always picked in a crouched down position. Dragging around branches of evergreens - rhododendrons, and winter is coming.
Or ruiskukka (= rye flower) as it's known in Finland, since for obvious weather reasons we cannot grow corn. This was my other grandmother's favourite flower, the one who passed away earlier this year. Quite a woman she was, very typically Häme Finn. She loved depressingly sad music and could belt it out with an unsuitably happy mood. She was always very interested in what the neighbours were doing and who were visiting them. She had that strange quality where small annoyances were worth a long complaint and real problems had their place in jokes, or sideways comments that ended up with a "let's not make a fuss about it though" (= ei tehrä tästä ny numeroo / let's leave it entirely and don't tell anyone I said any of this).
Here's some of my grandma's favourite music! ):D
Peltoniemen Hintriikan surumarssi/The Funeral March of Hintriikka of Peltoniemi.
Hintriikka is dead, and the song lists the tragedies of her life. She was born poor, got to visit the church three times in her life one of which was her funeral, married but her husband died young. This song is often titled the most depressing song ever made in Finland.
Ontuva Eriksson/Limping Eriksson.
Eriksson is a poor old guy who dies and goes to Heaven - or does he? No, he watches people enter through the pearly gates but deems himself not worthy of joining "the fine people" who he's accustomed into thinking as his betters. Instead he sits outside of the gates and puts his begging hat down and is happy in his own way, because "it doesn't look like rain tonight and not a policeman in sight". The song ends with the line "it's best for you to stay outside of the gates - or is it, Eriksson?"
...yes, two versions. I can't decide which I like better, the salmon pink or the white geranium, so I went for both. This was one of my grandpa's (again, not the ghost, the other) favourites. He was a gardener and managed to grow one geranium, or pelargonia/pelakuu, into a huge bush over a metre tall. It now belongs to my mother.
Hey, since the other grandpa got a story this one should get one too, right? Not a ghost story but perhaps still somewhat supernatural.
He injured his arm while working in forest and it became badly infected. The situation was so dire that the doctor decided amputation was the only option (this was the time before penicillin, mind) and so he was taken in the hospital for the night.
While he slept he dreamed he was walking in a garden he didn't know, but knew he owned. It spread out in front of a large house he had never seen before but, as dreams put it, was also his. He was much older in the dream and, most importantly, had both arms.
When he woke up he made it clear that he would not go through the amputation and no amount of convincing turned his head. The arm ended up healing, and although the infection did harm at the nerves so that he could never straighten two of his fingers again he didn't die and could keep both his arms - and many years after he indeed built the house, and the garden as well.
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Well, that was a long entry! Thank you for reading, I hope I didn't entirely waste your time. :)
Kimono time again! Finally this lovely wool kimono sees more action. It's really warm but even so I had to add a haori + scarf + mittens (my Cthulhu mittens btw) to withstand the cold. Also I began using my plum flower pin because soon is the time!
Here's what's underneath all that, my new haneri, obiage, obijime and my old but favourite obi. I love daruma...
I never knew I loved to build my coords around the theme of nature before I moved to Iceland but holy wow, with the kind of nature Iceland has I began almost immediately to either match the coords to the surroundings or even use some part of nature as influence. For far I've made coords based on f.ex. the following (you can click all photos larger if you like):
Ice and snow.
Heather-grown lava fields.
Driftwood.
Snow on lava fields.
Lupin fields.
Just nature in general because look at that background ashdgJSHDGAJsajhda
Naturally I also do it with kitsuke - this one's autumn colours. They last here for maybe about a week before the storms arrive and tear all the leaves off the trees.
***
This time I wanted to try something I hadn't done before though, so snow and lava were out of question. Instead I went for sky. Iceland, due to lack of trees, seems unbelievably open and that combined with mountains makes the sky look like it's very near. It's also amazing and I know I'm risking to sound like ALL THE COLOURS OF THE SKY here a bit but hey, ALL THE COLOURS OF THE SKY! Behold:
Sky it is then, multicoloured and with fluffy clouds:
Overdress + skirt + necklace: selfmade
Shirt + gloves: vintage
Bonnet: Mrs Parker's Millinery & Mercantile
Boots: Bodyline
Belt: Mary Magdalene
And a close-up of the front.
This was one of the most fun blog posts to make for the Lolita Blog Carnival! Others who partook in it are:
