Most of the kimono that I actually wear on a daily basis are woven, or 'predyed' kimono. These have a lower degree of formality in Japan than kimono that are printed, and are used for at-home wear, casual occasions, parties with friends, etc. The principal weaves in my collection are Meisen, Tsumugi, Omeshi and Sha and most of the kimono date from 1912 to about 1955. I really love these cosy, well-worn kimono, which are often lined in very thin pongee or even cotton.  

MEISEN

This is about my favourite weave of silk, made from damaged cocoons by a process that was invented in the Meiji era, bringing silk kimono within the reach of the general populace for the very first time. Meisen feels something like a thick taffeta and is strong and lustrous - a real delight to wear. Production ended by the 1960s. 

Orchid Taisho Roman with big grey peonies. This is the first meisen kimono I ever bought. I love the subdued quality of the grey and orchid-purple silk. It's in Taisho Roman style, which is influenced by the Art Nouveau movement in the west, but the colourway is quite unusual - such kimono are usually far more gaudy. 

Purple Taisho with grey stripe. This simple striped kimono has a wonderful lustre and is lined in the usual red silk. The hakkake is purple rawsilk - a fabric I've never come across elsewhere. 

Brown stripe Taisho. This kimono was only a couple of dollars because it's in very poor condition, with numerous holes, ladders and worn parts. I fell in love with the complex stripe, which contains many different shades of brown, coffee and orange, the scarlet doura and the lime green hakkake, and I am slowly and painstakingly restoring it, using appliqué strips cut from the han-eri. 

Cream Showa with red and black lattice. This was an impulse purchase costing a dollar, because I noticed no-one else was bidding on it. A lovely, simple, everyday kimono, whose red sections are almost op-art in real life. The photograph appears to show squares, but in reality, the diamond shapes are more prominent. 

Black hitoe with shaded green yabane. This is my first meisen hitoe - an unlined kimono for spring and summer outside of the usumono months. It's a Taisho Roman item (hence the huge pattern) and the shading on the yabane (arrow-feathers) is very rare. This kimono is simply lovely to wear - light as a feather itself at only 300-odd grams and with a wonderful crispness, but it's also surprisingly warm, as the silk is very tightly woven. 

Flesh-pink with black cross hatching. A truly lustrous kimono with the most gorgeous richness to the silk. Probably Showa era rather than Taisho, as it's a tad more subdued. A lovely kimono. 

Soft brown meisen with holly leaves. A kimono with a complex weave similar to the orchid meisen, and in real life, it's rather browner than this picture - not so coffee-coloured. Taisho era, but the design of holly leaves and berries is highly unusual and may be influenced by the west. In keeping with the winter theme of the holly, it's heavy for a meisen, at 780g.

Black Taisho Roman with gigantic fuchsia crosses. A  wonderful thick, cosy, satin-like weave containing thousands of tiny red lines. Again, it's a Taisho item, hence the large pattern. A wonderful, lustrous kimono. 

TSUMUGI

Tsumugi is a hand-woven silk traditionally woven for at-home wear by silk farmers, using up spent or spoiled cocoons. It has a natural slub, similar to shantung, and is always considered informal, but is nevertheless beautiful and expensive. Modern tsumugi kimono woven on a traditional hand loom can cost over a thousand dollars. 

Peach with orange flower trails. This is a fairly modern kimono and much as I have a downer on modern ones, I also have to admit that it's my best tsumugi, with huge slubs in the weave and wonderful multicolours of pink, black, brown, orange and peach. It softened up nicely with wear and is one of my cosiest, cuddliest-feeling kimonos. 

Green and yellow tatewaku. From the feel of this kimono it may be early Showa, but it's in Taisho Roman style and in strong colours, so who really knows? This is a super little kimono, with a lovely horizontal weave in the silk, and a quiet asanoha pattern in the green bits of the tatewaku (rising steam) motif. The doura is cotton, which is a sign that it's been lovingly worn.

Taisho blue and beige stripe with gold thread. A new purchase, in very lightweight tsumugi with a lovely complex stripe made up of other stripes, and a tiny gold thread in between. Gorgeous.

Showa russet with black abstract pattern. I self-designated this kimono as tsumugi, as it was just described as a komon by the vendor. A really lovely kimono with an oh-so-subtle black pattern in it that is almost like tweed. I really love wearing this kimono, with its cafe-au-lait hakkake. 

OMESHI

Omeshi was formally the highest-level of predyed kimono silk and in fact its name is an honorific term. It's technically a silk crepe, with a tightly woven twist and is heavy in feel - quite close to a furnishing-weight silk. The heyday of omeshi kimono was the 1950s and 1960s, when they were used as 'townwear' - a quite dressy level of everyday wear. 

1960s with urushi roses. My first omeshi haori, with a gorgeous lustre to the silk, brocaded pink roses and - not visible in this photo - pale bronze-coloured swipes, like abstract leaves, in glittering metallic threads. 

1950s with urushi leaves. Bought soon after the yellow one, this highly textured omeshi has metallic brocaded leaves in burgundy, blue, green and pink - a lovely colourway. 

1940s with genroku sleeves. Not the kimono in the photo, in fact, but a near-identical one that I was sent in error. Mine is red and white striped, with the stripes so fine that they look pink at a distance. The red stripes are raised, and the kimono is the most lustrous I possess.

Black 1960s with urushi clouds. All-over urushi kimono are rare beasts and I've bought the only two I've ever seen. This one has a rust-red doura and hakkake that give a pleasing pop of colour, and the abstract clouds are in gold, old gold, silver, copper and pink. 

Purple 1960s with abstract urushi. The urushi on this komon is more abstract and the omeshi is a tad softer. The urushi is more copper-coloured than in the black one, with occasional orange and bright silver sections. The colourway reminds me of a 1930s dress I once owned, in burgundy lamé. 

Black red and white 1960s with zig-zag pattern. This is a relatively new purchase to wear every day, which attracted me by reason of its massive zigzag pattern. A good everyday komon with a bright colourway that should brighten a winter's day. 

SHA

Sha is one of the Japanese silk gauzes - the other being ro, part of the 'usumono' group of fabrics - translucent fabrics for summer wear. Sha was originally a highly proscribed fabric - it could ONLY be worn by those travelling to the Emperor's palace in the month of August. Now, it's considered suitable for in July and August, though here in France I've been wearing it throughout June and now, in August, it's too cold. In feel, sha is like a stiff organza and stands away from the body - this sturdiness makes it a useful fabric for supporting woven techniques such as urushi, which would distort ro.

Red sha with big grey flower rondels. This is my only woven sha kimono (my other sha is a print - see Gallery Part Two - komons) and is made from incredibly stiff fabric with quite a scratchy feel. It really does require underkimono, as you're meant to wear with usomono silks, because otherwise the neck would be uncomfortable, but it's wonderfully cool to wear in hot weather. This deep red colour is a traditional summer colour in Japan - beni-hitoe - and I think this kimono is probably Showa era.

Hitoe are unlined kimono and they're a comparative rarity in modern kimono because the majority of people who now have kimono made only ever have one or two, so they tend to have the high-end type of furisode/tomesode with linings.

However, vintage hitoe kimonos are fairly readily available.  Nevertheless, searching for hitoe hasn't been high on my list of priorities. Perhaps I was put off by my first experience - a rare failing from Yamatoku. When it arrived, it was so filthy and faded that I had to take it apart for the fabric. Even then, it was mostly unsalvadgeable.

But back to this one. It's rare, says the vendor, Kofudo, and is either Taisho or Showa in the Taisho Roman style, and combines two of my favourite things: meisen silk and yabane pattern. Yabane is one of the most ancient patterns to be found in kimono, dating back to at least the Heian era (794-1195) and it's a stylised arrow feather or fletch. For centuries, it was equally to be found on men's kimono - it is, after all, a warrior symbol. Sometimes you find tiny yabane on garments, tightly packed, sometimes they're elongated to almost the length of the garment and sometimes, as here, they're just enormous.

I hadn't noticed until I'd already bought it and someone pointed it out, that the shading on the yabane is really pretty on this kimono. It's actually turquoise, not as blue as it seems in the pictures, and there are also lime-green bits that don't show up at all in photos. The combination of grey and black is also very subtle and attractive.   

When this kimono arrived I was made up - it's gorgeous. Really crisp, taffeta-like meisen (quite different from the pink one with cross-hatching) and only 390g, which is lighter than several of my yukata.

The juban, hardly visible, is just a sweet little polyester one that a vendor gave me with another purchase, and as an obi I'm wearing a length of rayon crepe kimono fabric with urushi chrysanthemums. 

The obi stay is my 5in deep one and it's very comfortable. Over it, I wrap the fabric front to back, then back to front, tie it in a knot, wrap it to the back again and knot it in a loose, floppy bow that lies flat enough that I can work at my desk. 

The kimono is very comfortable and smooth to wear, and the 18in-long sleeves stay well out of the way when you're typing.  

So this is me today in France in about 23 degrees and a high wind, having just taken off my tazuki cord and pinny (I was cooking lunch), and shod, although you can't see it, very inelegantly in Crocs (increasingly necessary after my foot operation last year). Time to invest in some tabi and zori, I think...

It's 30 degrees in France today and all day I've been wearing my new blue Sha kimono with white yabane.

This kimono cost only 99 cents on Ebay - I was the only bidder - and was described as 'mixed fabric'. The yabane pattern is a stylised arrow fletch and is one of the most ancient patterns seen on kimono. 

When it arrived, I quickly decided it was rayon. I know this partly from the feel but also because I did a burn test, cutting off the tiny scrap of fabric that is left over inside the sleeve edge gathering. This is a spare bit of kimono I've found quite useful for burn testing. You hold the fabric securely in tweezers, light it and check the results. In this case, no smell of burning hair (therefore not a protein fibre), no sticky black residue or plastic smell (so not synthetic), and very weak and crumbly black fibres with the surrounding fibres noticeably weakened (an indicator for rayon).  

I'm not sure how old this kimono is - somewhere between the 1930s and the 1950s by the feel of it, and also judging by the long sleeves. Long sleeves are seen on girls' kimono even now, but this is a kimono for an adult woman - hence the squared-off sleeve edge. Such long sleeves were more common on this kind of kimono in the Showa era.

This kimono is too short to fold at the waist and create an ohashori, so today I secured it with elastic and just tied a ribbon round it. Then I decided to tie the elastic over the ribbon to create a two-tone effect, like an extremely narrow obi (see below). I secured the neck shut with a brooch (left) - a measure that I find works well for me, though as a long-term solution, I think velcro might work better. I'll also consider adding interior ties, given that an ohashori isn't possible.

Afficionados will notice that I've worn this kimono without a juban, as if it was a yukata. It is a tiny bit see-through, but not too much, and the rayon fibre is very cool against the skin. Because I do wear western underwear underneath too, rather than Japanese, I also secured each open side panel with a single stitch about two inches below the sleeve join. This leaves the side body open, but stops it from gaping and showing your bra. 

I've felt extremely comfortable all day in this kimono, which is light, airy and has cool colours with the white and blue. It also has a massive stain on one breast, but it's not actually all that noticeable and I hope will come out in time. If it doesn't, I'll consider fabric painting over it or overdyeing.  

The reason that kimonos are so wonderful to wear in the heat is that they protect your skin from the sun from neck to feet, but are open under the arms, which makes them very breezy items for a hot summer day like today. 

I have been buying kimono again after a long gap, and oh what a joy it is.

The main reason has been the recession - for a couple of years, there simply hasn't been the money to spend on things that I don't actually need, however beautiful they may be. But just recently, things have improved a bit, so I have been able to indulge myself a little. 

The other reason, though, is that I've come up with a form of kitsuke that actually fits my life.

There are many people who dress up in kimono very formally, keen to obey all the 'rules' about what kind of obi goes with what kind of kimono, and how you should wear your collar, etc. 

I am not one of those. Kimono have to fit into my everyday life. That means I have always worn my haoris a lot, over dresses, skirts and jeans (sometimes with the collars flipped forward and the ties held on by buttons), but my long kimono almost never got an outing. I felt rubbish about cutting into them to deal with the overlength, and had quite given up on formal kimono such as tomesode houmongi etc, because I hated to wrap left over right.

However, last winter was glacially cold and in searching about for something to wear, I suddenly realised that kimono were warmer and more comfortable than almost everything else I owned. I started keeping my navy wool komon in the office, to wear as a popover, and now, for some reason, I am suddenly wearing my long kimonos and yukatas, duly wrapped left over right, as if I had always done it this way. 

The trick, I've realised, is the oshahori - the fold that you put in the waist of a modern kimono. I had always avoided this, instead preferring to shorten kimono from the hem, but if you do an ohoshori right, the kimono stays tight shut rather than flapping open all the time. I have come up with a method of securing it with a 2-yard piece of satin lingerie elastic. Fold it in half, slip the raw end through the loop and pull taut, then twist the loose ends in - voila. A very comfy koshi-himo that stays put but can be loosened with just a tug in the right place. 

Over the fold, I wear either a narrow sash, or a length of kimono fabric folded in half lengthways and wrapped round 2-3 times. Whatever way, the bow goes at the front - I sit in a chair  to work and I can't be doing with a taiko bow or somesuch getting in the way. Japanese women wore their obis tied softly at the front for centuries, so I refuse to feel bad about not going in for the obi-ita, obi-jime, obi-age and all the other gubbins that go along with the taiko musabi. Next step is to start making my own obis, I think. I have some cut-off stiff silk from a damaged fukuro that might take a bit of stencilling and work quite well. 

I'll blog individually about my new kimonos separately, but suffice it to say that it's got a bit out of hand, just like before. I must now slow down a bit. But meanwhile, do enjoy these new purchases. They include this black meisen with shaded yabane, blue jinken sha with white yabane, green and yellow tsumugi with takewaku pattern, and grey wool hippari (or possibly a dochugi). I've also bought wool kimono, cotton kimono, juban and yukata, and for the DH four wafuku - a haori, a yukata, a summerweight wool juban and a heavy winter-weight silk kimono, of which I'm deeply envious - they are gorgeous.