With the pieces all cut out, Dora has come to help with the jinbei.

Today I’m dealing with the seam finishes: different raw edge finishes for different areas. I’m more concerned about the jinbei top than the shorts, simply because I’m a little obsessive about a nice finish for it. I had decided that the back seam required the neatest of all of the raw edge finishes, and the fabric is very light and thin, so I french seamed it which does look beautiful but also very comfortable for sleeping.

For the rest, I simply finished every edge except the collar opening and lapels (because once joined they will enclose each other) with a narrow double hem. One thing to remember is the bottom of the lapels. These are not covered by the collar like they are in a haori, nor do they have the okumi (front flap panels) of a kimono, I made sure those two short edges below the lapels were nicely finished.

Jinbei jackets are usually side-seamed all the way to the hem, but I decided I’d like to leave neat splits at the bottom of the jacket for coolness and comfort. The downside to this is that this type of seam finish does add bulk under the arm, and I have yet to find a satisfactory way around this. With yukata and kimono, the graceful miyatsu guchi bypasses this dilemma, but I’ve never seen a jinbei with a miyatsu guchi. There’s really no reason why you’d have to reach inside the garment from the side that way. Here’s the garment with the edges finished and the sleeves attached.

There is a big incentive to sew up the sides and the bottom of the sleeves together now, but I have learned that it is far, far easier to get the collar on at this stage, before the back and front are joined at the sides.

And, now, with the experience of having put on many, many kimono-style collars, I know better than to try it by machine. I hand stitched the collar. And this turned out to be a good thing, because the diagonal edges on the front make the fabric quite stretchy, and this particular fabric has a little give to it anyway. Had I tried with a machine, I would not be getting a nice, neat, flat collar placing.

If you are truly determined to put the collar on by machine, I suggest stay stitching the entire front collar opening first – especially if the fabric is light. Because, unlike all the other kimono-style garments I’ve constructed, this one has these fairly extensive cuts on the bias, and the entire lapel area will stretch/deform under the pull of a sewing machine.

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Looking over the cutting plan on the free downloadable jinbei pattern, I thought I’d like it a little roomier, but the large was going to be too big. Also, I felt I could probably manage to be a little more economical with fabric and save myself a little time by cutting folded fabric, so I came up with this schema for using on the 145 cm fabric I bought, which had rather nice selvages too, which would save me some time on raw edge finishing.

As you can see, with this layout, I get a slightly larger garment, but only require 2 metres (instead of the 2.5 required by the free pattern) of fabric to make it. The side-seams of the shorts use selvage, so softer to sleep on, too. The four ties that keep the garment closed can be made from the sundry scraps. Remember that I am including a 2 cm seam allowance on all seams. But remember that, should you want the top a little bigger or a little smaller, you can adjust the seam allowance by a centimetre or two and still use the same schema. On the shorts, just add or subtract a centimetre or two off the side seams. Keep the inside seams on the shorts at 1 cm seam allowance. As you do not really want too much bulk inside there.

You can either cut the waistband and the collar strips off the un-folded fabric first, or do it after, but this way I had much less cutting and far less fabric waste. A downloadable pdf version of this layout is here if you’d like to use it.

The fabric I got for this is lovely, soft, cool, voile cotton, but is skittery as hell, so the measuring, marking, drawing the pieces onto it with fabric pen, and cutting the pieces out was a LOT easier with the two layers of fabric.

I have now cut out all the pieces. I’m thinking of joining the back body pieces with a french seam, because my fabric is so thin and soft, but I shall do turned and stitched seams for the rest. Because this is for me to sleep in, I’ll do most of the sewing by machine, but I’m guessing the collar will still go on more easily and neatly by hand.

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A jinbei is a set of garments: a top which crosses over to tie both inside and outside, and either a pair of shorts or long pants. The waist of the shorts/pants are either elastic or with a drawstring. These were clothes meant for lounging around the house during the summer or for sleepwear, and originally only for men, but in recent times they’ve become popular with women also. Muji has some for sale if you’re not interested in sewing a set up:

I’m considering trying to make a set, and figuring out a good pattern for it. Essentially, the bottoms are any length you’d like, and the top is a variation of a haori, with the front-piece crossing over more like a kimono, but there is no okumi (front flap). Instead, the front part of the body pieces are somewhat wider than the back, allowing for the garment to close neatly at the front. I did find a free downloadable pattern online, but I really don’t want to expend masses of printer paper. However, the site provides both cutting schemas and cm measurement charts for each of the sizes they offer, and I think I can work it out from there, without having to print out the pattern.

The ‘fabric needed cutting diagram’ is a little confusing, because there’s a Japanese character I don’t understand, but I’m guessing it is the width of the fabric in cm and then the length of the fabric. I’ve downloaded the Ladies Medium size diagrams for fabric and detail size.

Having used a translation tool, the Japanese character in black, to the right of each of the numbers in black, is indeed the fabric width, and the numbers in orange are the length of the fabric needed.

If we step back and think about measuring for kimono, there is a bit of variation here. We can assume that each body panel piece back width is going to be a half-yuki size. The cutting size for the sleeve is slightly wider than a half-yuki, which I think I will ignore. I’m not going to bother tapering the sleeve pieces either, since I like a wider/shorter sleeve myself.

Frankly, I am not going to bother with using this schema for the shorts, as I have a tried and true method for sewing up a pair of shorts with an elasticated waist. And, to be honest, I’m not a big fan of matchy-matchy sets – so I will probably sew a couple of pairs of shorts up in plain white cotton.

However, I found this lovely cotton voile fabric on sale at Ribes & Casals, and now I’m wavering about it. Maybe I could live with a matchy-matchy set of pjs with this.

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This was my first lined men’s kimono. I found a bolt of blue-black cotton fabric that was fairly thick and robust with the iconic seigaiha pattern on it executed in tiny dots.

Even though I found this fabric at an incredibly reasonable price – just 6 Euros per meter, it had the look and feel of something very traditional, so I decided to line it in an elegant, high quality sand coloured cotton batiste. The aim was to create a masculine, formal look, with a luxurious feeling when worn.

I made a lot of mistakes on this garment and it took much stitch-ripping and resewing to get it right. I was lazy in my measuring and the lining was significantly wider than the outer garment, so I had to unpick a lot of my work and resew, giving the lining more generous seam allowances. Also, I had not yet learned the lesson that would serve me well later: never try to machine stitch the collar onto a lined kimono. There are just too many layers to get a beautiful seam where the collar meets the garment. No matter how I adjusted my machine, I was getting ripples. You will see, in subsequent projects, that I didn’t learn this lesson for many months. My insecurity with using a sewing machine after so many years of not using one led me to believe that it must be my lack of skill with the machine settings that was causing the problem, but it wasn’t.

So, I can’t beat myself up. As a first try at a lined kimono, I was very pleased with my choice of fabric and lining. The sand-coloured lining gives it the feel of something old and formal. It drapes well and feels wonderful to slip on. But a close look at the collar seams shows my lack of expertise. Luckily, my partner, Don, is not obsessionally observant, and thinks it’s wonderful.

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When I get into a fabric store, sometimes the fabrics speak to me. They sometimes tell me what they want to be. When I saw this fabric, I knew it had to be a haori for someone very specific.

At the time I saw the fabric, I couldn’t have told you why I felt it would make a beautiful haori. I just knew it would. The fabric’s machine embroidery is very much in the style of the embroidery you see a Spanish shawl called a ‘Mantón’, often worn by women on festive occasions or used as props by flamenco dancers. What I didn’t know is that they have another name: manila shawls.

Manila is, I’m sure you know, the capital of the Philippines, which was a Spanish colony between 1565 and 1898. This gave them access to the Chinese silk trade. These large squares of embroidered silk became a very lucrative Asian export in the 19th Century. If you’re interested in learning more about the history of the manila shawl, there’s an excellent video on it here.

So, while I wasn’t consciously aware of it, my subconscious must have recognised that there was an Asian spirit speaking through the style of embroidery that had ended up being machine-embroidered onto that piece of lyocell. It isn’t even a fabric I would normally choose, but the earliest mantóns were actually made of banana leaf or pineapple leaf fibres, which is quite close to what lyocell is.

As you can see, the fabric is fairly translucent, and the underside of the machine embroidering is not a thing of beauty, so I chose a lining of matching cream lyocell. I also knew that the machine embroidery was too stiff to be used for the collar part, so the lining fabric would also have to be used to construct the collar. I would have loved to find a eye-popping bright red lining to match the flowers, but I could only find the right colour in an organic dyed cotton, and I knew – I just knew – no amount of pre-washing would stop it from bleeding onto the outer fabric. So I settled for cream. For some reason, Jacques, my Vietnamese street cat was also extremely enamoured of the fabric and kept trying to make biscuits on it, which wasn’t ideal, as it damaged the embroidery a little.

Instead of using the haori construction I was most familiar with, I used the one detailed in the House of Kimono Haori pattern. In retrospect, that was a bit of a mistake. His pattern uses rectangular plackets under the arms, which gives the garment more width. This would not have been an issue had I been using a lighter, less structurally complicated fabric, and it would be a huge plus if it were intended to be worn over big-bowed obi at the back, but that’s not how this garment is going to be worn, and I cannot say I feel the side panels do much for the garment.

I’m embarrassed to admit it took me ages to get up the courage to cut into this fabric. I worried about which way up the embroidered flowers were going to sit. Because the haori, like the kimono, is one continuous strip from the hem at the back, over the shoulders, to the hem at the front, I worried for weeks as to whether the flowers should be growing ‘upwards’ on the back of the jacket or on the front of it. I finally decided that, since the front was going to have the plain cream collar on both sides of the opening, the direction of the flowers didn’t matter so much. It was on the back where the embroidery would really show itself fully. For that same reason, I did not put a seam into the back of the haori; I left it as one piece and simply cut out the neck and opening area at the front.

I am pleased to say that I’ve done enough of these now not to fight the fabric. I just kind of flattered it along. The lyocell’s raw edges have a propensity to shed, so even though the piece was going to be lined, I felt the need to finish all the raw edges off, and I did that with a very tight zig-zag stitch by machine, since it would be hidden by the lining, but the rest of the garment was all sewn by hand.

Once the collar gets attached, there’s really no going back without a lot of tears, so making sure the lining was sitting exactly right before I started stitching was really important. Those little plastic clips, holding the kata-yama of both layers nice and secure turned out to be very helpful.

This is not the sort of garment I feel comfortable wearing. It is very much a statement garment. Since the woman I made it for dyes her hair a rich, vibrant garnet, I sensed she would not mind standing out in a crowd. I think this haori would definitely do that.

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One of the creative decisions you can make with kimono is how to approach the collar. The structure is pretty much a fixed thing, but if you’re lining the garment, you can decide whether to make the collar from the outer fabric, or the lining.

I wanted to make something quite informal and cosy for my brother. He wanted something to wear instead of his bathrobe or a sweater on chilly mornings while working at home. So we went to the fabric store together, and he picked out a ballet pink double gauze for the outside, and we decided on a lining with a quiet print that would harmonise.

I wasn’t certain that the gauze he chose would have enough structure to act well as a collar. I feared it might fold and puddle around the neck area. So there were two options: to use some light interfacing that would give the collar structure, or use the lining as the fabric for the collar. While it was a fairly soft cotton poplin, it did have enough thickness to stand up if doubled.

This is rarely a worry with making yukata or kimono, because in that garment, the front side panels are folded like a fan and become an interior part of the collar. Plus, a kimono has a tomo eri (the collar’s friend) which is a shorter piece of fabric that lays over the collar around the neckline and, when worn or too stained, can be removed to reveal a pristine collar beneath. I have made a haori with a tomo eri for myself, but traditionally, they don’t have one.

In this case, using the lining as the fabric for the collar was a choice I’m very happy with. It’s visually pleasing, and gives the garment a touch of formality. However, while I love the feeling of the double gauze, it really doesn’t appreciate being ironed. And that is something we need to do, over and over, as we construct the garment. The ironing flattens out the fabric, which significantly broadens it and makes a nonsense of one’s measurements. The nature of the gauze’s wrinkled quality also doesn’t make for nice neat seams. On the bright side, my brother will never iron anything, so the practical part of this haori is that it can be thrown into the washing machine and dried out on the line.

As you can see from the two close-ups, I had a problem with the lining ‘leaking’ out beyond the sleeve. This is because I ironed both pieces very well before joining them. Once the moisture in the air ‘fluffed’ the gauze back up, it contracted. The other close-up shows a similar problem with the collar. In this case, because I joined the collar to the body after a good ironing which flattened out the gauze, in a couple of hours, it stitching that joins the collar to the body began to ripple. Here is an excellent reason to hand-sew. Had I been a little less diligent with my ironing before attaching the collar, I could have had a far neater join as hand-stitching allows for the variance of fabrics in a way that a machine stitch cannot.

So, yes, all in all, it looks a little… sloppy. But I’m confident that with wear and wash and time, this garment will find its groove, keeping my brother cozy on chilly mornings drinking coffee on the balcony.

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