What’s The Damage? We’re On A Boat!

Ka-Chow! What’s poppin’, fellow weirdos. It’s ya girl, Becky, back at it again with the evaluation station. Which is exactly the same as my display area. Which is also in my room where I sleep. That’s right, these things hover over me and torment me, even in my dreams. Which is fine, I guess. I wasn’t doing anything in there anyway. Incidentally, I once had a very vivid dream where I was locked inside of a Wal-Mart which was just a giant camping section with the full cast of The Land Before Time, and they slowly became the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, and then when it rolled credits they were hieroglyphics. I do not do drugs. I’m just like this naturally.

That was relevant as fuck.

Anyway, here’s the fucking boat I kept telling you Iwas gonna post but kept not posting. Look at it.

Behold! The majesty! The decadance! The fucking giant Satan-bird soaring in the sky ready to murder everyone aboard with his lazer eyes.

Look at the fucking terminator up there. LOL Birbinator. I mean, let’s not be unwelcoming of our new machine birb overlord, it’s not like weird-ass tsuru are a novel thing on this blog. I’ve got psycho birds for days.

Between Little Timmy Tsuru, the Pupil-less Twins, and the Eyeless Fucking Freaks, our new friend The Terminator is not weird here. Not gonna lie, that psycho avian freak is half the reason I bought this damn thing. Also because she’s a dirty, dirty girl.

So let’s have a peek at the filth, shall we?

Right off the bat, we have some moisture damage. The white on a lot of these hikifurisode tends to be more of an opaque paint than whitened silk, and anything made in the 20’s or 30’s is going to be fugitive as fuck. Fugitive, in this context, refers to a pigment that is not colorfast for whatever reason. In this case, it got wet and fucked off to other areas of of the kimono. In a strange twist of whatever, the red is actually pretty colorfast. It’s the white bleeding over onto the “raw/nude” areas that are more the problem here. I’ll probably try to chase them back out with acetone.

It’s also just straight up dirty.

With some of the worst stains actually being on the hiyoku (a partial second layer sewn in).

So I suppose when they were done getting married, the bride and groom, they took a nice romp through a bog or some shit. I dunno. What I do know is that this pepto-ass hiyoku is coming out to get a good hard cleansing because it is goddamn filthy. At a glance, it seems like it wants to lift with the vinegar method, so I’m at least a little hopeful. If it doesn’t, though, I might dismantle it and do the big bleach–I mean reductive bleaching, you step your sweet ass away from that clorox or I will shoot you–and then possibly just redye it whatever color I want. Probably red. I don’t hate the pepto pink, but it isn’t the color I would have chosen, and I’m the one fixing it now so I get to make the decisions.

Moving on, the largest issue this sweet mamber-jamber has is that she had some amazing and elaborate kinsai (gold paint) done at some point and holy mother of Terminator birds, it has deteriorated and needs redone. Because of course it does. Why wouldn’t it? Why would I bring a kimono home that didn’t need extensive kinsai repair? But dude, the rigging on this boat is what’s gonna be on my fucking toe tag in the morgue. So when they ask you how I goddamn died, it’s this:

I might be bitching really hard about things I purposefully bring upon myself, but I’m actually very excited about all of these things. Especially when I get a good look at the way these thicc, juicy-ass hems lay. Tell me with a straight face you don’t want to chew on these.

And the hiyoku kept the hakkake (inner lower skirt featuring a design) from getting disgusting, so I do have that going for me.

And as a final shiny, check out the embroidery on this sweet girl. Like candy, I tell you.

And that actually about does it with this shiny bitch. She’s a hikifurisode from the early Showa era, around the mid 1930’s. She’s fully made of silk, and she’s got a death robot bird and a big-ass boat. I actually don’t know enough about the Spanish Galleon looking ship to tell you about it, so I’m off to go research it. It’s not takarabune, that’s a different thing. This boat is very western, even though it is filled to the brim with traditionally Japanese patterns such as kiku (chrysanthemums).

Join me next time when I threaten a peacock with a gun because Chicago, and possibly take you through some age stain removals on some sho-chiku-bai (plum, bamboo, pine shown together) sweetness.

BYE.