Shihoko, The Bride by Caela Conn Tyler

The source of this design is the formal wedding portrait of a dear friend, Shihoko Osaki Taniguchi of Wakayama, Japan. Twenty-eight years ago, Shihoko lived with me for seven weeks. Shihoko is a combination of the traditional and liberated Japanese woman. This piece embodies her. The exquisite beauty of her traditional wedding kimono represents the centuries old Japanese life-style. Yet the piece offers freedom and exploration in the background that portrays elements from the gardens surrounding Shihoko’s family home.

The fabric design of Shihoko’s wedding kimono was so intricate that a stitched rendition of it was successful only by layering stitches all worked in various silks. I elected to use dimensional techniques (stumpwork and several attachments) to portray her bridal accessories and the padded kimono hem.

Although the intricacy of the kimono presented challenges, stitching Shihoko’s delicate porcelain doll-like face was daunting. (My experiments and edits took 22 hours.) I finally discovered that the secret to capturing Shihoko’s face lay in including very small fine details such as a tiny straight stitch in a darker flesh color at the corner of her mouth and a thin to slightly thicker dark line along the top edge of her eyes (the way eyeliner is really applied as opposed to that dark line being a consistent thickness).

In contrast to the complexity of Shihoko’s kimono-clad figure, I treated the background which includes elements of the gardens surrounding Shihoko’s family home with very simple non-dimensional stitches in quietly colored cotton threads. I felt that this contrast further emphasized the complexity of Shihoko’s kimono.