Imaginal Casements

Here are some pictures of my newly-obtained BJD in a just-sewn (by me) unlined cotton kimono and basic obi. (Yes, very basic.)

http://pics.livejournal.com/incandescens/gallery/0001f2ky

(And yes, I have just realised that I crossed her kimono in the wrong direction before taking all these photos, and she therefore looks as if she should be laid out for burial. Whoops. Also darn.)

Still, not too displeased with the effect. (joasakura may recognise the fabrics.) Next attempts will be a nagajuban (under-robe) and a lined kimono. Possibly cut slightly less full in the body.

I did also sew the quilt she's kneeling on, too.

Being able to do this sort of thing is a great relief from work stress. Really.

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Charity is a fashionable virtue in our time; it is lit up by the gigantic firelight of Dickens. Hope is a fashionable virtue to-day; our attention has been arrested for it by the sudden and silver trumpet of Stevenson. But faith is unfashionable, and it is customary on every side to cast against it the fact that it is a paradox. Everybody mockingly repeats the famous childish definition that faith is "the power of believing that which we know to be untrue." Yet it is not one atom more paradoxical than hope or charity. Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

- Heretics, GK Chesterton