A  new jacket, just finished and shipped last week. ‘Flame’, because I thought those narrow pieced strips looked like rows of lit matches.

The vertical strips are cut from the facings found in some kimonos. See how they fade from a deep red to white? That’s because a Japanese artisan, with a broad brush, painted along the fabric’s edge and let the red color bleed into the white.

The painted pieces were originally used for the inside edges of kimonos so that when the wearer walks and moves, the edges flip open to revel a bold bit of color. It’s a flirty, hide and revel, coquettish kind of a thing.

They come in lots of colors, the blue example above or here’s a pink and the red that I used for my jacket “Flame”. Pretty, yes?

I love this stuff. I’ve used it in small pieces, as with this jacket, or in their full width. I have a couple examples one on my website, a jacket called ‘Eddies’ [under “other tops”] or here on my blog, one of my first posts, a white on white jacket, listed under ‘applique‘.