Airing out

[unixronin]

Another batch of kimono, haori and doboku just went into the dryer to air out, plus my hakama.  Found one more damaged kimono, too, sad to say;  but five damaged out of probably close to a hundred isn't bad.  I suppose after we're done, we'll have to actually maker a formal inventory and photograph everything for documentation.  Some of these pieces are ... wow.

Comments

[rbos.livejournal.com]

Where'd you get those?

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

Ditto. Got a Kimono in red?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Exactly one, as it happens; a brilliant red silk under-kimono with a white collar.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Lo, these many years ago, jilara and I learned of a quilting group in the area that was ordering a bale of kimono rags from Texuba, a crafts/textiles importer, and selling shares in the bale (since each bale was something like two or three hundred dollars). We managed to make a deal to buy a 1/20 share in the bale with the understanding that we would have first pick of any complete or nearly-complete kimono in the bale. The expectation was that there might be two or three repairable kimono in the entire 200lb bale.

To everyone's considerable surprise, the bale turned out to be more than 60% intact kimono. We made off with the choice picks of the lot, went home, did some research, and figured out what had happened.

The key fact was that the Japanese rice harvest had failed that year. With a shortage of rice, the temples were short on food and probably getting few if any donations of rice, so they had to go into their storerooms of accumulated donations to find things to sell to buy rice. Evidently among other things, they cleared out large amounts of donated clothing, and Texuba's supplier in Japan bought them up and sold them off in with the other kimono rags they had. Figuring that this opportunity probably wouldn't last long, jilara and I decided to strike while the iron was hot and order a couple of bales ourselves.

My memory is a little hazy on the exact details of what was going on with Texuba. If my memory is correct, they were already having a sale because they had lost their lease, had to relocate to a new warehouse, and didn't want to move any bales they didn't have to, and our initial two (or perhaps it was three) bales were ordered out of that sale. They were almost entirely composed of complete kimono, some requiring minor repair. Around this timeframe, their supply dried up when the Japanese government realized their cultural heritage was being shipped out of the country as rags and stopped the exports. Lacking a supply, Texuba went out of business, and at about this time one extra bale showed up unannounced on our doorstep. We never got an explanation of it; our best theory was that, unable to sell them in time, Texuba decided to dispose of their last few bales of inventory by shipping extra bales to their most recent customers.

If memory serves, we ended up with somewhere between 150 and 200 intact assorted kimono, haori and doboku, a handful of hapi coats, and a dozen or so obi, as well as a number of partial kimono (missing sleeves or more). I now have somewhere around half of them, and jilara of course has the other half.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

It was actually $1000 for a bale, and we had bought a couple "shares" of the original bale. Then we took the plunge. :-)

Texuba is actually (maybe) still in business. I bought a "share" in an obi bale that Ruby was eliminating after she went out of business, from her private stash of obi bales, and got some great obi. I thought that was the end of it. And then a couple years went by, and I got a notice of a special sale/show where she'd rented a hall. I drove down to Torrance for it. Seems she was buying by the piece, now, and selling individually-priced kimono. She went through an expansion phase with shows twice a year in the Los Angeles area and San Francisco. Then the supply got irregular, even by individual pieces in Japan, and the SF show was dropped, a couple times. Prices started a very steady climb toward the clouds. The last SF show was grim in terms of stock, and she was talking about retiring again. Everything was discounted, which meant you could almost afford them. But the days of the amazing bales are long gone...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Eek. I'd forgotten it was that much....

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

When you visited the first time they were in the closet behind the cd rack and dining room table. The second time you visited, I'm still not sure where we had them stuffed. I think they were in boxes a closet.

Now they are folded neatly and being displayed in a bookcase in the living room.