Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Looking forward to Easter!

Easter this year means four straight days off work for me!
Working two jobs and an on-line course is starting to take its toll a bit as I haven't managed to juggle all my tasks. Need some organization I do.
Plus my boyfriend will be home too so we can spend some quality time together, usually when he's at work I have time off and vice versa.
It would be really good if we could do something on the house but I think we'll be catching up with friends and watching movies :) which sounds awesome too!

I've been a bit slack lately on my Etsy shop, I haven't had as much spare time as I would like to devote to it at the moment but the March sale I had was great! I sold a few tsuke obi, some more obijime bundles and I had another custom order for obidome! I made two lily of the valley designs and a bright red camellia.
I switched to a better quality resin and the pieces feel a lot nicer too. It is a bit more tricky than the previous type but the results are worth it.
I've also managed to source a type of flat wire to use on the back which I'm using now and looks great as well, the thin, round wire served its purposed but didn't look very nice, but I'll use that on the small designs for the thin obijime.
Which leads me into...
I've started making up a few obidome designs for the vintage thin and really wide obijime.
I only have a couple of designs for both right now but I plan to sell them with the obijime as a set.
Hopefully I can get that up in a few months, I'm still sourcing the obijime.
The last things I've added to my shop are some obiage bundles: Here all in lovely colours :)

As mentioned in my previous post I've been experimenting with some metallic colours and those are coming along nicely. The pewter and bronze colours look fantastic!
I hope to be able to photograph some of the things I've made over the Easter weekend and get them ready for my shop :)

And now some photos, if you've managed to read all that without clicking away in boredom ;)
The pewter and silver colours.
Pewter is the darker one in the back and silver is in the foreground.

Bronze and gold colours. I was surprised how well it turned out when I put the two together on a piece.
I imagine the same could be done with pewter/silver as they share the same "cool" tone or "warm" tone for bronze and gold but I don't know how well a silver and bronze obidome would look, for example.
No doubt I'll give it a try at some time ;)

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Bright Stripes!

On Sunday I thought I'd try on my new kimono and obi.
I don't have many kimono that fit like they actually should and it was really nice to be able to wrap it around my big hips with a good overlap and sleeves that nearly reach my wrists rather than half way up my forearms ( who knows that feeling?!)









I tried to pick an obiage/obijime colour that would be strong enough against the colourful-ness of the kimono and obi, I think it looks ok but perhaps there would be a better combo out there.
I like this kitsuke :) Partially because it was a recent purchase and I wore it instead of putting it in my cupboard for 2 years, also because its different to what I usually wear and a bit brighter.
The obidome is a "pewter" kiku. Lately I've been experimenting with metallic colours and I think they look pretty good.