No 120

Dear Customers & Friends
Hello from Japan! This is Kimono Flea Market ICHIROYA's News Letter No120.Recently we got some very rare items, and which includes a fantastic 'shima-cho' in them. As some customers already know, shimacho is the vintage scrapbook of pieces of fabrics. We already have sold some shima cho at our site, and here is photos of one we list now.http://www.ichiroya.com/item/list3.php?no=70257'Shima' means 'stripe', and 'cho' means 'book'. Shima cho is considered to be very valuable because we can know what kinds of fabrics people used in olden times. Not only weaver in Japan, but also famous designers in the world are attracted by shima cho, which seem to inspire them.In olden times many people wove fabrics in their home both for merchandises and home consumption. Good weaver had to study design and technique by themselves, and most antique shima cho were made by them for collecting samples of weaving design. They ( most of them were the wives of farmers, and wove fabrics to supplement the family income ) collected fabric pieces from their ordinarily used clothes, and put them on the discarded papers or books.We have seen some antique shima cho, but the piece we recently got is exceptionally lovely piece. That piece looks very special not only because it includes lots of antique beautiful fabric pieces, but also its pasting way is very elaborately. Pieces are pasted with fine spacing, and all its pages look very beautiful. We can feel the very deep affection to the fabrics of the owner from each pages.Owner had to collect fabrics she liked for long time, and paste one piece one piece with great affection to them. Recently shima cho is very expensive, and we sometimes find recently made shima cho, which must be pasted at a time without cares on the old books. We can easily find antique books and old fabrics, so making fake shima cho is easy. But this piece is absolutely different from such pieces. We will list it on our site near in future. Please enjoy the photos of it at that time.
To know the ages of pieces, we will list here some hints here.
*Most of fabric pieces of shima cho are stripe pattern one, although the 'koushi'(check) pattern fabrics are included. It is because that shima (stripe) pattern is comparatively easier to be woven, and at a time fine stripe pattern was thought to be very 'iki'(cool).
*Fabrics before mid Meiji period of populace at large were cotton or asa(Japanese hemp). Silk was the fabric for samurai, court noble or monks, and most ordinary people were prohibited to use silk. So farmers only could blend useless short silk threads within the cotton fabric for their home use. Shima cotton pieces of early Meiji period(1868-1912) or earlier are often blended silk.
* Before early Meiji period(1868-1912), threads are hand woven one, and after Meiji 10 (1878) machine woven threads increased.
*Colors of antique fabrics are dyed with plant dye stuff, and most of them are made of two or three colors, like natural ai blue, brown and yellow. Chemical dyestuff was invented in Meiji 23(1891), and from ending Meiji period(1868-1912) colorful chemical colors became to be used.
*Kasuri cotton is become common after Meiji period(1868-1912). Machine woven kasuri like Bingo kasuri were made from early Taisho period(1912-1925). So chemical dyestuff and kasuri are the good clue to know the ages of fabric pieces.
By the way sometimes our stock room become almost full. Do anyone want kimono bundle package? We can make approx 12-13kg bun dle package, which include about 10 kimono, 10 haori and more. They have some(or quite many) stains and most materials are silk, but includes some synthetic ones. We can not they are valuable pieces like items listed at our site. But we often see many feign buyers buy such quality's kimono at low price, and send them to their countries. It must be different between selling at site and selling at real stores in the feign countries.We can offer the package for 88USD(we can not discount the price). Price is the almost the same to theseller's auction price, but we can not provide any more informationabout this package. Shipping cost by sea will be approx 70 USD to UnitedStates, Europe and Australia. We believe if you are a seller, you canmake good profit with these packages. We seem to be able to make approx 20 packages. We will offer them for the first come 20 e-mails from this news letter readers.
We feel we had to write little more about samurai spirits at the previous news letter. Of course we know 'samurai spirit' and 'Japanese artisan souls' lost against the 'pioneer spirit' of United States. While Japanese people sticked to polish the details with artisan soul, United States and other Western countries invent new technologies, and take the world by storm. Chemical indigo beat the natural ai, computer beat mental arithmetic and soroban(abacus), and the strongest samurai was easily shot by gun. We don't think Japanese way is always best at all.
** To see our website, there was certain time which took quite a longtim to see sometimes, because of many customers visited at the same time.We are proceeding to have better server so that each page can be seenfaster. Thank you for your patience now and the server will be soonready.
We have just added today's new arrivals including supreme Kurotomesodekimono and obi-we will be very HAPPY if you have time to check:
http://www.ichiroya.com/item/search.php?md=1114 domo arigato gozaimasu and have a subarashii(wonderful) new week!
with many thanks from JapanIchiro & Yuka WadaKimono Flea Market "ICHIROYA"http://www.ichiroya.com
e-mail: info@ichiroya.comaddress: Asia-shoji Bldg.301 1841-1 Nishi 1 chome Wakamatsu cho Tondabayashi city Osaka 584-0025 JAPANTEL&FAX ****( international number ) - 81-721-23-5446