Sew a Nagoya Obi with Me

We are totally in a typhoon right now and I am insanely Hima in Japanese which means I'm so bored I don't know what to do. So I thought let's sew and make a video out of it. In case you're here for the first time my name is Beauty Matsunaga and I am a fully trained and licensed kimono teacher and stylist and if you're really here for the first time you should know that usually I start off my videos in our washitsu which is Japanese for Japanese room but as we're in a typhoon right now all the shutters of our nice big windows are closed and it's super dark in here and I couldn't be bothered to set up lighting in like two rooms. So this is my sewing space or as I often call it dining room because it's actually a dining room. I by the way just came back from my Okinawa vacation. You probably know when you're on my Instagram you know that I was in Okinawa for a week and we spent time on Okinawa island and another part of Okinawa prefecture that is called Ishigaki island and it was breathtaking. The most beautiful ocean you could ever see. The beaches are so clean wherever you go the beaches are super clean. So that was a dream come true. However Okinawa prefecture itself is very famous for kimono tradition and they actually have a few craftsmanship craftsmanship. I wonder if the wind lets me talk now for a while. No? Okay. So Okinawa has a few craftsmanship traditional arts for kimono making especially on Ishigaki island which is part of the Yayama Shoto. I'm gonna say Japanese because I'm not very confident of my English pronunciation. Yayama Shoto consists of 15 islands and they have like so many kimono weaves there. It is amazing. And I had the chance to take a weaving workshop in or on Ishigaki island at an atelier that is called Miniya Kobo. The menus they let you choose from for their weaving workshops are really fun and they also have saki some workshops which is really cool. And of course they also sell their own products there and you can actually watch people weaving there which is also pretty cool. So yeah I got myself this Nagoya Obi fabric. I can probably now finally take it off. Those stickers here they actually show you that this is a real thing and it's registered craftsmanship. Everything in that atelier was by the way hand woven and I couldn't believe it because today you barely find any hand woven kimono items anymore. So this is really cool. This obi is a so-called minsa ori. Minsa ori or the minsa weave is probably the most famous on Yayama. I'm gonna talk about its history and its meaning behind the pattern later when I'm making this obi actually which you're gonna join me today. And minsa ori is really easy to identify because it has this pattern. This obi is actually a mixture of hana ori which is another famous weave in Okinawa prefecture and minsa and it just takes the minsa pattern and is produced with hana ori. That's why this is called hana minsa or was it hana ori minsa? I think it was hana ori minsa probably. You guys probably think that I never really show you how to make things traditionally but this video actually will. So usually when you buy a Nagoya obi roll, a cloth of a roll of cloth of kimono cloth, tanmono, they look like this usually. Like this. These are two Nagoya obi I have purchased a long time ago. I never made them and now I don't like them anymore because red obi is not a thing anymore for me. And this one is four years old. There are woven Nagoya obi like this one. Woven Nagoya obi means that they have a pattern that is produced by the weave by the weft and warp and there is no dyeing after weaving this obi. These obi have dyed pre-dyed yarn. They use pre-dyed yarn that's called sakizome in Japanese and then they weave the obi and the obi is basically finished. That is how woven obi are produced. Then there are dyed obi. Dyed obi is just having white fabric brought that's already pre-woven and then they paint and dye the fabric into the motifs and color they want that obi. Dyed obi usually have a thinner fabric. It's really not that stiff fabric. It's close very close to a normal kimono fabric and sometimes it is even a normal kimono fabric which means when you would make that into an obi without an interfacing it wouldn't be a Nagoya obi. So those obi need an interfacing and that interfacing has to be sewed into the obi and to cover up those edges you have a sewing allowance of one sun. I have been talking about the Japanese measurements for kimono sewing in my let's talk about kimono sewing supplies video so make sure check that out. So sun is one of those measurements one sun. So those obi in total have a width of nine sun and you call that kyusun in Japanese and you might have heard of a kyusun Nagoya obi. That is what that actually means. They have this one sun additional to the normal eight sun which is the width of an obi. These kind of obi, these woven obis here, they are already hassun and I'm going to show you later why. We're going to see how you make those obi, how you sew them together. You can measure this. Oh it's not perfectly hassun. This one's not perfect. It's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. It's hassun ichibu. So it's eight sun and one bu. But that's still I think it's machine made. I don't know why this is a little wider. And my second obi fabric I have here is probably hassun too. Oh it's also hassun ichibu. Okay and centimeter. Let me give you some centimeter. It's usually about 31 centimeter. Yeah it's about 31 centimeter. And this one is, this is hand woven so I do expect this to be perfectly eight sun. Perfectly eight sun. Look at this. Oh my god I love this. Yeah so they have eight sun. That is why these obis are called hassun nagoya obi. And this is the only difference between those two. They are both casual obi. They only can be made into a nagoya obi. And they can't be formal. And especially woven obi have because like this minso ori is quite rough. So you can actually tell that this has to be a casual obi. This can't be formal. Hassun nagoya obi by the way are sometimes even called fukuro nagoya obi. It has nothing to do with a fukuro obi. You can also call them hitoe nagoya obi. And I think that is where a lot of confusion comes from. And I'm probably gonna get into detail about what that is in a few moments because I really want to get started sewing. So for this obi, this obi is 100% cotton. Because typhoon can't go out I don't have any nice white cotton thread here right now. So I'm gonna use actually one for machine stitching because I want this thread not really to be showing up. So this is a white machine stitching thread I'm gonna use today. First of all you have to find out where is gonna sit the otaiko. As you know otaiko is the most common way to tie a nagoya obi today. And so most of those nagoya obi are made to be tied in otaiko. I hope you can see this here. Okay so when you open up this obi you can see that there are these lines here. Two lines here and one thick line here. This is your taresaki. So this is what is going to peek out under the otaiko. This little tail or what else you would call it. It's taresaki in Japanese. This obi is awesome because it already tells you where you have to fold this back because you want to have a little more stiffness under the otaiko where the otaiko is gonna be. So you want to have this, by the way, two layers of fabric there. So you're gonna fold this back at this line when you have this line. And then later when the obi is done you can also use these lines as a guideline to form the otaiko. And it's gonna look like this. So this is how your taiko later is gonna look like. So sometimes you have those lines on a obi fabric which is pretty cool when you have them because they're a huge guideline. They will help you a lot. This obi here is hand woven. So usually hand woven obis don't have that. So I'm gonna tell you what you're gonna fold inside. It's san shaku which is three shaku. And I'm gonna write the centimeter on screen. You can see where the obi ends here. You have these two lines here. This is a tome ito. So you can see that the weft yarn is pride thick. It suddenly gets super thin and thick again and thin again. This is just to hold this obi together. This is gonna be my sewing allowance. I could also take like a really small sewing allowance depending on how long I want this obi to be. But I already did a test by laying it into my Japanese room with this length and it was okay. It was pretty long so it was okay for me to have those two lines as a sewing allowance. By the way as you could see all of my obi fabrics have a different width. A lot of people think that obi sizes are actually standard size. They have a standard in Japan for obi width. That is not a real standard. So there are a lot of obi that absolutely don't have that measurement. I have like the weirdest sizes of Nagoya obi in my wardrobe. So this is my edge here and from this edge I am gonna measure san shaku and this is what I'm now gonna fold in and I lie wrong side on wrong side by the way. Yes we're gonna stitch wrong side on wrong side together. Just gonna make sure that this is a straight line here. Probably gonna remeasure it just to be really sure. San shaku. Very good. So yeah that is basically already it. The only thing I want to do now is and I honestly don't really know if there is a correct order you should do this what I'm doing now when it comes to sewing this together. So we will sew this edge onto the fabric with a chidori kake or someone actually reminded me that it's called having bone stitch which I of course found out in the meanwhile by myself and just to answer that comment I'm not very interested in how things are called in English because I'm fine with actually already knowing it in Japanese but that's actually not a good thing to do probably. I should I should know that stuff in English too. So I'm now trying to align those edges nicely. It's hand woven so it's not really straight those line those side edges which is actually pretty cool which also means probably it doesn't have to be that neat but I wouldn't mind if it would be and I'm gonna use those clips because they're easier when you work with thicker fabric. Kyusun nagoya obi when you sew those they I think they take a little more practice because you have to insert the interfacing and you want to have that straight and stuff so that's it's just a little more practice but it's not that's not doable. So and as I said I don't know if there is a right order for this but I usually start with fixing the edge fixing this edge here onto the rest of the obi with a herringbone stitch or chidori kake in Japanese and that's what I'm gonna start with. When you also have like problems sort of hand sewing like remembering hand sewing stuff like I do chidori kake is the one that goes backwards so you should start here because you're going to move this way. We had a typhoon in Okinawa too by the way so this is actually the second big typhoon at least we could do the weaving workshop also on Okinawa main island I wanted to do a bingata workshop but Okinawa actually has announced state of emergency which is totally understandable so most ateliers were actually closed and there were like no workshops offered. We did do a sangosome workshop which was lots of fun. Sangosome you might know this one of my obi that was actually gifted to me from a former kimono teacher. I didn't know that sangosome itself existed so actually a few followers on instagram pointed out to me that this is sangosome and then I did a little research and then we were also lucky enough that there was still one atelier in Okinawa that had opened to let us do a sangosome workshop and I showed them the picture and talked about the obi that I was gifted and I was asking if they would knew something more about if they knew probably something more specific about it if they could tell me something about it and when I told them that it's tsumugi because that dyed obi is a tsumugi fabric they were kind of like oh then it's probably one of ours because there is no other atelier that does sangosome on tsumugi. I was kind of like are you for real? So I am finishing this up and then I'm gonna check in with you later. So look at these cute little herringbone stitches or shidorigake. It's not my best stitching I'm really good at this but I think the cheerleader effect totally helps when herringbone stitching something. So the rest of this part here will just be sewed together which I will show later because I want to get started on the other side but when you sew this down you have two options the first option actually is to just sew down both sides from top to bottom but you can also only sew down 10 centimeter here from the bottom 10 centimeter from the top here then you would just have like these layers in the center loosely which when you tie a taiko would look like a nijutaiko which is the formal tie of a normal taiko. Isn't that smart? I wouldn't do this with this specific obi I would also not do it with this red obi but when you for example would have a white hakata ori you could also wear that with a tsukesage or other semi-formal kimono to a semi-formal event and it would look like you have a normal nijutaiko although it's just a normal otaiko. Isn't that cool? I don't know if that is one reason why this obi is also called Fukuro Nagoya I don't know so as I said with this obi I'm gonna go all the way down and I'm gonna do this later because this is gonna take the longest. You know that there are many many many many many different shapes of nagoya obi which are all nagoya obi they just have a different shape how they're tailored and I think every kimono enthusiast has like a favorite among them. When I would do this as a normal normal nagoya obi I would now fold this part here into half and create a triangle here on top of this like so and it would look like this this is what you would do and then you would have to sew this whole part together like we're gonna do here too. This is the most common shape of a nagoya obi. You could also on the other side of tesaki this is the tare with otaiko. Tesaki is the part that will peek out of your otaiko. You could also just fold this part here this little sewing allowance even probably just twice inside just not to have this fringy edge here and just make another herringbone stitch along this side here. Then you would have some kind of a hirakishitate. It would just leave the obi as it actually is and you would have to fold it while tying the obi around your waist. I do not like that too much because this part here is going to peek out of the otaiko and it always I don't know why it always looks a little messy when it's just folded here but I basically do like that to fold the obi when I wrap it around myself because I'm for Japanese standards I'm tall and this means when the obi the maigata here on the front is a little wider than usual I think it fits better or it balances better with my whole silhouette and that is what I enjoy a lot and when you fold it by yourself this means you can actually change the width of the front here. We call it by the way habadashi but I don't like this open end here peeking through your taiko so what you're gonna do with that is that one shape of nagoya obi that has like only folded about a 30 centimeter from the teisake this is sewn together here and then it's just open practically you have to fold the obi by yourself so this is by the way my favorite shape of a nagoya obi because of those two reasons I still can change the width on the front plus it looks way neater on the back what peeks out from my taiko. I'm going to do a matsuba shitate with this obi so first we're going to fix this edge this is the wrong side so when I fold it this is gonna be this is how this obi is gonna look like and I'm already gonna shape it a little so it's easier for me to work with it nice clean edge here and then I'm already gonna pre-fold it a little what I'm doing right now is basically how you usually finish off all edges of your kimono sewing like the edge of your collar eddy and stuff like that I think I showed it in my upcycling a mofuku into a fitting undergarment I think I showed that I was probably running out of time with that video because the video is very long so I probably did not a very good job with that so now we're gonna fold this open and we open this up the sewing allowance you open everything up and then you fold it the other way I'm gonna fix this together okay and now I will sew a normal running stitch with hopefully unshin I'm not sure if I'm gonna be able to do unshin with this with hopefully unshin I set my stitches about eight millimeter from the edge and I'm also not gonna go from edge to edge because it's easier to fold it inside what I want to do okay so the straight is something else but we're fine and now we just fold this back inside into the shape we have actually hopefully pre-ironed it nicely and then just ironing it and done and that's about this here now we are going to decide how long we're gonna sew this together I think I'm usually it's hasun it's eitsun how long the obi width is I probably want to give it a little more I probably want to sew kyusun so I'm just pinning this together and then start sewing this just like so yeah and I have promised you to tell you what an hitoe nagoya obi is which is like I know it's confusing especially when you don't speak Japanese hitoe basically just means one layer one layer which means for kimono it's a kimono without a lining there is the one layer for obi it also means just it just means no interfacing because just one layer although I have the otaiko doubled here because I want to have a little stiffness to it it is still only one layer so that is why this is a hitoe nagoya obi it's a one layered obi and it's not an obi you would wear with a hitoe same goes for hitoe haori or hitoe anything usually just means it's one layer and not that is meant to be worn with a hitoe or hitoe nagashipan although hitoe nagashipan they're meant to be not so hot because a second layer actually means lining so an unlined nagashipan is definitely not so hot as a light nagashipan but it doesn't mean that you can only can wear this for hitoe season and yeah I know that a lot of people get confused with this um just don't don't get confused with that it's it's like the simplest thing you could it's the simplest thing about kimono but it's when you don't speak japanese I think a lot of the names are a little confusing so now we're coming to an end finishing the seam off with this here like so and now when we fold this part here where we ended sewing down and try to have this here in a 90 degree angle this is our triangle isn't this pretty just gonna iron it in place and I think as when you make obi when you have the triangle it just really feels like being an obi sewing an obi as you can see is really not hard this is by the way really the traditional way to make this this is no easy make this is really how easy it actually is to make a hasuna well kyusun isn't harder okay so now this part here is done we are gonna sew this part down so let's talk a little about minsa ori. Minsa ori is famous in the yayama and yeah it's I think woven since the 16th century what I have researched originally minsa ori was woven by women when they fell in love to their target of passion and yeah the presented man minsa ori and that is why also this pattern actually has a very sweet meaning it consists you can see consists of four and five rectangles of consists of these two motifs and this actually means itsu no you demo sui naku and translated it would mean heavily ever after literally translated it means in whatever world always together I think would be a good translation for it and it is actually a play of words with the word itsu which means actually five it's another reading of five and when because it's whenever world actually but for translation issues I would say whatever world and yo which is another reading for yon which is four in Japanese which also means world or also generation and now in this case it's world and yeah isn't that sweet so that's why it consists of four and five rectangles and this motive is like everywhere in Ishigaki because of the typhoon we couldn't visit any other islands of Yayama Shoto but in Ishigaki that motive was everywhere which shows how proud people are of this and it's really a sweet history I think okinawa itself actually doesn't have a kimono culture because it was a different kingdom they had their own they have still their own traditional wear although that traditional costume we know and you probably also know was only worn in the palace or could also be was only worn by aristocrats so I found some pictures in books I got during my vacation about which looks like what people actually wore outside the palace or just like the normal population they wore but unfortunately because of the state of emergency all museums were closed so I couldn't do like real research on what people actually wore in history so that's probably a video to come because I'm quite fond of Okinawa so I'm gonna finish this obi off in a few more hours it's just the same same stitch I'm gonna do on both sides all to the bottom and yeah you're probably gonna see some pictures of when I'm finished I by the way have a hand-welding giveaway from this atelier as soon as I hit 5000 subscribers on this channel so thanks for being here if you're new here and you want to learn more about kimono from a professional kimono teacher please subscribe to this channel and I talk to you in my next video bye