Mōri Tsubakie

Konnichiwa, everyone, I am Mōri Tsubakie. I've been playing in the SCA my entire life, as I'm a second generation SCAdian. I've lived in the West my whole life, but in April of 2019, I uprooted my happy Japanese persona and moved all the way out to the Far West/Japan. I've been a Japanese persona for at least eight years, as I can’t seem to remember exactly when Sir Hosokawa Takashi won his Coronet. I play mainly in the 1550’s time period, also known as the Azuchi-Momoyama Jidai. My persona is a daughter of the rising warlord Mōri Motonari who historically died young and whos' name has been lost to history.

As an artisan, I focus on Japanese artistry, be it embroidery, garment construction, garment design, or many other things. I am still branching out, as there are many, many different forms of art in the Japanese purview, and I still have much to learn. I do try to find documentation for the things that I make, which can lead down some INTERESTING rabbit holes, but there isn’t a lot of source documentation left for my time period. Much of the documentation I can find is in the form of images or secondhand descriptions, as many of the originals and documents were destroyed when Kyoto burned to the ground in the Warring States period, so it makes it a challenge to be as accurate as I want to be. Aren’t entire cities burning to the ground fun?

When I have the time, I also love to share the knowledge I’ve accumulated with others, and do my best to teach what I know. If you have questions or want to learn more about Late Period Japan, feel free to come ask me stuff on the SCA Japanese page!

Here's some of my various art. I tend not to get a lot of pictures of what I make, because I get caught up in the making, and then it's a finished thing that gets packed up and sent wherever it's going. Most of what I have pictures of are large crafts that took several days, and I happened to remember to take progress pictures after I'd finished for the night.

Here are the construction photos from my submission piece. It took me about three months of solid work on evenings and weekends to make this, and though it didn't turn out quite the way I wanted it, I still think it's one of my best pieces so far.

Design phase! Playing around with various stitches and thread color patterns to figure out how I wanted it to go, as well as getting in some stitch practice so I'd be good at the stitch I chose for the final piece.

I ended up deciding to needlepaint the whole thing, even though it wasn't ENTIRELY period. I thought it was pretty, and the argument can be made that it could have been done.

While I waited for my fabric to come in from the States, I decided to make a kumihimo cord. From an entire spool of crochet cotton. You know, like a dumb.

When you think about how long 33 meters is, you don't really realize quite how long that ACTUALLY IS. Even split into eight chunks, I had enough thread to braid a cord that was almost 8 yards long. That took ma a solid month of constant braiding, and the next time I get the random urge to make my own cord, I think my fingers themselves will rise up and smack me in protest.

And we are now getting started on the embroidery! My fabric came in, and I had everything ready to go!

I decided I hated the way the yellow looked, so several days worth of edging had to be removed. Oh well!

This is about three weeks in to the embroidery, and my fingers were already hating the brick stitch. Those stitches were between an eighth of an inch and half an inch long.

Four weeks in, can I be DONE with the green yet?

Forget it, I'm tired of green. On to something else!

Five weeks in, and you can kinda see the thing starting to take shape. The yellows I picked looked different enough when I chose them, but when I mixed them together to get the painted effect, they were too similar, and blended together too much.

Yay! It actually looks like a flower thing now!

So much green. So very much green. . .

Five and a half weeks in, and still so much left to do. . .

Now that the mon is complete, on to the KANJI

What color to pick? Red would make it too Christmassy, but those are his colors, so what am I to do?

Yellow, apparently. I was sick of green, and red was just wrong.

I was crunched for time at this point, as shipping was going to take at least two weeks, and I had four left before I wanted it to arrive where it was supposed to be. I didn't take many pictures during this time, as I worked until my fingers were too tired, then fell into bed.

Seven weeks in, and the kanji was FINALLY done. Now I just had to sew the thing

Three days after that, and eleven and a half weeks from start to finish, it was FINISHED.

The finished piece is the favor my fighter in Meridies currently wears, and is based on a historical Japanese sode jirushi, or sleeve banner. I used pictures sourced from several historical armor books to design it, and scaled the size off of a measured recreation found online. While not all sode jirushi had phrases written on them, some did, and all of them had some sort of device/mon on them. The mon on this one is the device I am working on getting registered, but embroidered in my fighter's colors. The base fabric is a printed cotton piece left over from when I made my garb, and the embroidery floss is cotton DMC floss split into strands of two. I think, of everything I've made so far, I'm the most proud of this. Blood, sweat, tears, and weeks of research went into this, and I can proudly say it's my most historical creation to date.