I spent a lot of time working on the Geisha tonight. I trimmed the juban (the orange clothing you see under the blue kimono) by about 6″, since the kimono was shorter and the juban was hanging out a bit, and it just didn’t look proper. I’ve also put a couple of tiny hook and eye closures in it to keep it closed up.

I also sewed on the kimono’s sleeves, which wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be on the machine and required only a minimum of touch-up by hand. Thankfully, there was no need for me to break out the steak-knife seam ripper, since I made certain that the sleeves were pinned correctly. There’s nothing worse than realizing that you’ve sewn a sleeve on not only inside out, but facing into the inside of the item. There’s going to be at least one hook and eye in there to keep the upper part closed up properly, but hopefully the obi will keep things tidy. I’m debating about putting one a few inched below the obi so that I can keep the lower part of the kimono somewhat closed as well, but we’ll see; I don’t want to put too much strain on the fabric, and I sort of like the look of the juban showing through the slit a little. In the full body shot the kimono is more open than it should be because the fabric is very slippery and she was sliding down the pillow I posed her on.

The obi is made of two parts. The wider orange obi is made of the same orange fabric as the juban and has a very faint slightly zig-zagged stitched edge. It’s about 2′ long, and at this point isn’t tied all fancy-like because I’m just going to have to undo it to put the hook in the kimono, iron it, and to do the hair. The multi-colored woven obi was something that caught my eye this afternoon in the clearance bin in Walmart’s craft department, and matches the rest of the outfit perfectly. It ties it all together, as they’d say.

At this point, I haven’t done the face. I’m testing out some white fabric paint to see if I can get a good geigha-like makeup look to it without making it look horribly obvious that it’s paint; I want something “softer”. Unfortunately I can’t find my airbrush kit to do it, but i’ve got a couple of ideas that i’ll be testing out on some scrap this week. I did buy the buttons for her eyes and some red embroidery floss for her “lips”, but naturally can’t do those or the hair until I work out the makeup.

The stepdancer monkey got her tail put on yesterday in anticipation of going to her new owner today, but Eddie forgot her here at the house. Once I run the dishwasher I’ll put her by the door in the kitchen for him to bring tomorrow. The Irish bride monkey is coming along. I sewed up all the pieces the other day and stuffed the body, and I just sewed up the monkeycrotch. Unfortunately I don’t have enough stuffing to fill the other bits today, but Eddie should be picking some up for me when he leaves work. This one takes more stuffing because the socks were wider and longer; the legs are about 8″ longer than any other monkeys I’ve made. I’ll have to modify the dress pattern a bit so that the skirt part is longer, otherwise the monkeygirl will be in a miniskirt for the wedding.

Once I get done with this one, I’m going to make an effort to get a bunch of the smaller ones made out of all the socks I’ve got stashed in the sock-bag. Expect to see more of my original smaller monkeys showing up online again. I definitely need to get myself something to store all my sewing shit in. I’ve got fabric, thread, pins, and socks all over the place. There’s bits on the couch, and bits in the bags. Everywhere.

I’m not sure what kind of dog this is. He’s black with red and white argyle and faint blue accents. Kinda cute, but definitely not the greatest little dog to come out of my machine.

And now for something completely different, the sock weiner dog!