Gearing Up for the Year of the Dragon: Peevish Takes Another Stab at Kimekomi

Fearless and I were treated to a swell time by Matsuzaki last week. She asked her friend, who teaches kimekomi in Tokyo, to show us how to make dragons for our upcoming special birthday year. The Year of the Dragon will be even more special for me than for Fearless because she'll be a mere forty-eight while I will celebrate the beginning of what the Japanese refer to as my "second life" when I turn sixty next July. Fearless is already tired of hearing me refer to myself as extra-special so she'll probably be ready to strangle me by the time the Year of the Dragon actually arrives.

I love the fact that turning sixty is cause for celebration here. If questioned about my age back home, I'd be mumbling behind my hand. Just my luck to get old a decade or so after America knocked Wisdom off its pedestal.

At any rate, we gathered at Matsuzaki's house in Kamakura. That in itself is worth a couple more posts but today I'll stick to kimekomi which, as most of you know by now, involves tucking small pieces of fabric into crevices carved into a small object filled with sawdust.

This is what our dragons are supposed to look like upon completion:

This is what I found inside the box of supplies the teacher distributed:

This is the teacher. She's using a sharp little spatula to smooth the crevices before filling them with glue. She doesn't speak a lick of English but Matsuzaki-san is an excellent translator.

Yuka-san and Matsuzaki-san

You might recall that Matsuzaki-san operated a shop until last June where she sold all sorts of items -- tote bags, skirts, table runners, jackets, book covers, etc. -- she fashioned from scraps of old obis and kimono. She has, in short, nimbler fingers than most. The teacher gave each of us a pair of tiny scissors for cutting the excess fabric after the crevices were stuffed, but Matsuzaki-san was the only one of us permitted to touch the scissors. I picked mine up at one point but the teacher told me in no uncertain terms to drop them. Remember how I said she doesn't speak a lick of English? Yet I knew exactly what she was telling me. It was all in the tone of voice, hauntingly reminiscent of Nicholas Cage declaiming, "Put The Bunny Down!"

Teacher snipping excess fabric

Jamming fabric into crevice after excess fabric is snipped

We covered the dragons' bodies today and will meet again soon to finish this project. Everyone else placed their fabric in the direction that was shown in the example but I glued mine in place upside down to look more like real dragon scales. Not that there is such a thing as a real dragon, of course.

This is what my dragon looked like at the end of the lesson:

So far, so good.