I made this pillow using silk kimono fragments I acquired over many years. The hand-painted central panel comes from a tomesode kimono, and is part of a large, continuous design that ran along a hemline. The tiny, dotted komon pattern on the left panel would have been used for a lightweight summer kimono. And the stencilled pattern on the right panel is one of my favorite Japanese textile designs: a domestic landscape of roofless rooms in a traditional garden that captures the easy flow of space between indoors and outdoors that is so integral to Japanese aesthetics.

The insert is feather and down, and the dimensions are 12" x 20."