Sashiko

Knowing that our travel around Japan for two weeks in April would involve lots of train rides (not to mention the plane rides!) I wanted to pack something that I could easily stitch when we had a bit of time to keep my hands busy. My current project at the time was a hand-sewn kimono, which I guess would fit the bill, but was also a little bulky for our travel. 

I had borrowed a book from the library on sashiko, which is a style of Japanese and stitching that is becoming popular as a way to mend or repurpose clothes, and I wanted to give that a go. Two days before we were due to leave, I grabbed out some fabric from my stash and prepped with with four different designs to try out. 

There was a lot of prep work for this. You have to sew the fabric into a bit of a loop and then draw up a grid so you can trace your designs evenly. I ended up with four different designs, in what I hoped was going to be progressively challenging but not too far into the deep end for me. The girls were really keen on a tortoise shell design that was just a bit too much at first. 

You can see all the grid lines and the rough outline of the design I wanted to do here. 

I read all the rules on taking sewing things on planes and was fairly confident that I could get my housewife on board, but I did pack a spare set of everything, just in case. I also pre-cut a bunch of thread so if they took the scissors off me at security but left the needles, I could still get work done. 

As luck would have it, I didn't have any troubles getting the scissors through security, though they did tell me that if I flew out of Sydney or Melbourne it would be a different story. I started stitching the first one on the plane over - please excuse the photo in the cramped seats of economy and with the bad plane lighting. :P 

My guide lines are on the other side, but this was starting to look good!

I took these with us when we went to Hakone and sewed them on the pirate ship on Lake Ashi, and also on the shinkansen to and from Tokyo. They were perfect. I did a bit of experimenting with different colours for the boarders and in the designs as I got more confident too. 

I'm pretty dang proud of how they turned out, though I'm not sure what exactly to do with them now. Possibly turn them into featured sides of a reusable bag? Or make a zippered pouch out of them? The cool thing is they are very reversible, but I'm not sure how the stitching will hold up if being attacked by pencils all day, so I feel I'd have to line it with something anyway. 

That however is a problem for another day. For now, these are done and were the perfect thing to travel Japan with us.