I just arrived to Japan three days ago and have been wildly busy.  But if anything makes you stop and smell the roses, it’s, well, the gorgeous blooms that seem to be everywhere now in Kyoto.

Camelias, like the ones pictured above, are in full force right now, and there are many varieties to see.  This type (sorry, I don’t know the species name) is strangely perfect, or, rather, beautifully perfect.

And the early cherry blossoms are just peaking now: the later blooming ones are almost fully opened.  The stark bloom, pictured above, does not accurately portray the countless cherry trees, each of which is a cloud of millions of  lushly delicate blossoms, the color of which is a pink so pale that it is almost not a hue.

And in front of Gallery Kei is a peach tree, each bloom heavy and dense with petals, and the colors both pale and rich.

With luck I’ll be posting more local color while I’m here in Japan.  Oh, and already I’ve found some wonderful new textiles which I’ll offer on the webshop when I’m back in New York.

This is a long, tattered cotton kimono shown inside-out.  The patches inside–their color, their size and their stitching–are raw and beautiful.

The base of this kimono is a fairly lightweight, grey-colored cotton.  Most likely, and this is just speculation, this piece was bought second-hand and repaired at home by a poor city dweller or someone in a small town or village.

The color palette of the patches and the kimono’s base color are beautiful, as is the stitching.   And by looking closely you’ll see that there is some hemp stitching used to affix the patches to the ground–always a plus in old, Japanese folk textiles.

Above you’ll see a remnant of a tenugui, or a traditional, Japanese hand towel.  This fragment, on the left of the above photo, shows a sliver of the traditional hemp leaf motif or asa no ha. 

Again, above, you’ll see the dusty, muted colors which make this old kimono so alluring.

And on these two photos, above and below, you can see how much stitched repair was utilized when mending this old coat.

I’d estimate that this boro kimono, in the state that it’s in, dates to the first half of the twentieth century.  The kimono itself could likely be older.