Japanese banner at home

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the Japanese banners I repaired and mounted.

Here's a photo of the longest banner, happily hanging on its wall.  What a wonderful location!  It looks almost like the banner was made to fit the stairwell - or vice versa.

Thanks to the owner for sharing this photo with me.  I'm pretty pleased with the outcome!  

Japanese banners

A friend of mine, who has done a substantial bit of world travel, asked me if I could repair four World War II banners they had purchased in Japan, and prepare them for hanging.  They are silk, and I decided to back each one with a light-weight silk.  Three are 21"-25" wide and 80" long, and one is very long, 25" wide and 126" long.

This is more than a little off my usual path, so research was called for.  I found great info at this site:
http://militaryantiquesmuseum.com/military_antiques.php

Banners - nobori - have a history of use in war and ceremony.  This website calls them "going off to war" banners:  "These commercially produced colorful banners were pre-printed with military designs. The family and friends would then personalize them with patriotic slogans and/or the soldiers/sailors name."

I was confused about to how to deal with fold lines and wrinkles.  It's generally recommended that vintage fabrics be steamed rather than submit them to the dry, contact heat of an iron.  This is because the fibers tend to be dry and perhaps brittle, simply due to their age, and are therefore much more prone to scorching.  Also, they will get even drier and therefore weaker over the long haul.

But I was concerned about the steam's effect on the inked inscriptions.  Would the ink be color fast?  Years and years ago, I took a couple of classes in sumi-e, Japanese brush painting, and from that I knew that the inks were definitely water based.

So I wrote to the military antiques website, inquiring about how they remove the wrinkles.  I had already poked around on the site, and found it to be a super impressive collection of items from all eras and all localities.  It's a great resource for anyone with a love of military memorabilia.  I got a response the very next day, saying that they iron from the reverse with a very low heat, and recommended that I do a small test at the beginning.  It's still adding dry heat, but at least I knew that it didn't generally create any short-term problems.  Thanks!

I found that I could add a little water to the bad wrinkles in un-inked areas.  (And when the job was done, I pressed from the back, with the new lining acting as a press cloth, again with a cool iron.  I found that a little steam did not disturb the inks, and hopefully added in a bit of moisture to balance out the pressing.)

Then, on to the mending.

A couple of the banners had areas of wear and outright tears.  I backed those areas with silk, and couch stitched the worn spots to those patches to give them extra support.  I changed between black and cream Here's the back view, patch fabric basted on.

Here are before and after pix of some of those areas.

  

     

Then, I add the silk backing.  Three of the banners had seamed-on, solid-color borders.  I decided to stitch into those seam allowances to give hanging support where there are several layers of fabric.  I stitched with a tiny zig-zag stitch.  There are little horizontal stitches on the front, within the width of the seam allowances.  These are perpendicular to the direction of the hanging to give safer support.  They are about 1/2" apart. 

Along the edges, I turned the silk backing edge inside, and stitched the edge closed, making what is sometimes called a knife edge.

The longest banner had no added borders with handy seam allowances for hanging, and also was in the worst condition.  I decided to bring the backing around to the front as a binding.  Again, I made stitches perpendicular to the hanging direction and less likely to pull through the weak fabrics.  This time, though, I stitched in a wider zig-zag, and made two columns of stitches.

from the front:

from the back:

The hanging sleeve at the top had some tears in it, so I brought the backing fabric around to the front, covering the worn sleeve, and creating a new one.

And here are the completed banners (in addition to the one at the beginning of this post).  

    

                                  long one, top                                                 long one, bottom

   

And, here's a photo of one of the finished banners in its new location.

Embroidered Garden

Here's a crazy quilt with some very intricate and very fanciful embroidery.  This quiltmaker was really fond of swirly, trailing vine designs, and so am I, so I'm totally smitten with this quilt.  And as the owner pointed out, the stitching is incredibly even and neat.  This was made by a lady who really loved her needle and thread.

To make it even sweeter, it is a family quilt, and has lovely family history attached.  And then, even better, it has an embroidered dedication and date:  1905.

It's in very good shape, too.  I just vacuumed it, and gave the owner a bit of instruction in how to stitch down the (very) few places with some dangling, shredded silk.  The patches are both wool and silk.  Some of the stitches are in wool, some in floss.  The backing is gingham.

Now, sit back and relax and enjoy this delightful embroidery.

Cozy Wool

Here's a friendly, cozy wool 6-pointed star quilt.  It was made by the owner's grandmother and holds lots of family loving.

The quilt was recently washed - in the washing machine.  This is not a good idea with a wool quilt!  Washing wool in warm soapy water is the way to make felt, after all.  The quilt came through the process in surprisingly good shape.  The forest green diamonds bled onto the backing, but politely didn't bleed onto the top.  Several seams pulled open, and many ties pulled through the top.

So my job was to close open seams and replace missing ties.

The ties had the same effect as on the Peter Pan redwork quilt that I repaired just a couple of months ago.  They had felted themselves into little nobbins of wool.  My brand new "replacing felted ties" technique proved to be exactly what this quilt needed, too.

The difference was that these ties were multicolored.

A trip to my local craft store (Tom Thumb - the place to go if you like friendly, helpful staff instead of chain store anonymity and lack of variety) netted me a wonderful variegated yarn and a green that together pretty much added up to the original palette of the ties.

I used the same technique as on the Peter Pan quilt.  My ties are only 2-color, but I think the overall effect pretty well reproduces the original look.

I really enjoyed working on this one.  It has a lovely homey feel to it, don't you think?

You Can't Take It With You

Last weekend, Thin Ice Theater presented the Moss Hart - George S. Kaufman classic "You Can't Take It With You".  Comedy ensues when the the straight-laced Kirby family meets the eccentric Sycamore family.  There is also a lovely message about living and enjoying life to the fullest.

One goal of the costuming was to clearly express the difference between the two families.  The Kirby's are neatly pressed and dress in subdued colors, hair expertly coiffed.  The Sycamore's are a bit wrinkly, their hair a bit mussed, and their clothes much more colorful.  Their friends each have a unique look that reflects their stories and personalities.  Our director Eileen set us the goal that the audience should laugh when each walked on stage, before any words were spoken.  And at the same time, we tried to avoid making anyone overly charicature-ish or clownish.  The play is set in the late 1930s.

Here is the family and their guests around the dinner table:

Here are Mr. DePinna and Paul, in the clothes they wear while making fireworks in the basement.  Mostly, this gave us the opportunity to pull out a few of the wackiest things we have.  These guys were such a good sports about it, and actually got excited every time we gave them something else outlandish to put on.  Paul is wearing one of the dusters that was made for Little Women last fall.

We dressed Donald quite casually, since as he says, he "don't go nowhere much".  And then added a crumpled fisherman's hat and cowboy boots.  Eileen's direction was for Penny to be a Lucille Ball type character.  Penny's theme became polka dots, to bring out her endearingly ditzy personality.

Below on the left is Essie. She dreams of being a dancer (and our actress has taken loads of ballet).  Eileen asked her to be an innocent, with a dark intensity that surfaces now and then.  All her costumes had to have full skirts and petticoats for lots of twirling.  Her husband, Ed, was to be basically geeky.

To their right is Grandpa, the anchor for the whole family, and the source of the philosophy of the play.  We decided to keep him dressed pretty conventionally, a dapper old gent.  But he's not totally pulled together, doesn't have a complete suit even though we do have the pants that go with that jacket.

And on the right is Henderson, the tax man, getting agitated trying to explain to Grandpa why he must pay his back taxes.

Next, here is Rheba the maid.  She's a sweet, gum-popping blonde.  We found a great wig for her.  To make her basic maid costume more fun, we pulled out all the aprons we have, and she wore a different one for each entrance.

She is talking to Tony and Alice, the romantic link that brings these two unlikely families together.  They are dressed in their finest as they go off to see the Monte Carlo Ballet.  

Then, Mr. DePinna puts on his Roman costume, modeling for Penny's artwork, while Penny is wearing her "painter clothes".  The Roman tunic is one of the few things we made from scratch.  We had the helmet in our costume collection.  After this photo was taken, we got some taller socks and he wore them with sock garters.  That was something I saw while looking at photos of other productions, and I really liked it.

In the background, you can see Essie coming downstairs in what I like to call her ballerina-wannabee costume.  It was a pink dotted Swiss petticoat that was restructured a bit, a white silk camisole-style blouse added, and then both embellished with pink lace and ribbon bows.

Here's the fateful moment when the Kirby's arrive for dinner.  I picked a red tie for the son, Tony, to give him a bit more liveliness than his father.  For me, the tie symbolizes that Tony is drawn to the wackiness of this family.

And here's Ed talking to one of the three G-men.  The G-men all wore basic black suits and fedoras and white shirts.

Here are two friends of the family.  The Grand Duchess Olga Katrina and Mr. Kolenkhov.  The Duchess is on break from her waitresses job at Child's Restaurant.  Eileen wanted her to be wearing a strange combination of duchess finery and her waitress uniform.  I researched fancy waitress uniforms of the day, and found a photo of this hat.  Annie miraculously reproduced it.  Eileen loved it because it has the look and feel of a tiara.  We inherited her fur wrap a couple of years ago in a box of fur bits and pieces. We left it torn, because she is down on her luck a bit after the Russian Revolution.

Mr. Kolenkhov is Essie's ballet teacher.  We found this huge beard for him that almost exactly matches his hair.  He is an impressario-wannabee.  We dressed him in tail coats, as he is always bemoaning what has become of the grandeur of Russia under the Communist government.  (He is also my son.)

Costume portraits are on my website.  This was a super fun show to costume, since we could break loose a bit and have lots of fun with silly costumes.