Yesterday I learned how to make a kobukusa, a small squareish piece of silk brocade used in tea ceremony to provide padding between the tatami mat and a raku bowl, or between a bowl and a lacquered tea container that would be stored within for certain portable types of ceremony. Here are my photos.

Traditionally, the silk can come in one of hundreds of prescribed patterns called meibutsugire; it's also used to make precision-fit bags for tea containers. The neat thing about kobukusa is that it has no sewn edges on the outside—you should not be able to see any of the stitching. It's pretty clever that way.

Mine, made from a silk/rayon blend that I ordered, turned out not half bad, thanks largely to help from an advanced student after I botched parts of the last edge.

I'm a novice at sewing—as I'm always telling people, when we had an assignment in seventh-grade home economics class to sew a button on a scrap of fabric, I got a D—but this is something I can do. I plan to make some more.