For English-speaking kimono sewers
Free, printable PDF patterns generated from your measurements. Built for traditional and modern fabric widths. No sign-up, no email wall, no upsell.
Why this exists
Most English-language kimono patterns are sized to a single 'standard.' But you're not a standard — and modern Western fabric isn't 38 cm wide. This site fixes both.
01 / fit
The tool takes seven measurements and recomputes every pattern piece — body panel, sleeve, collar, overlap — using the proportional rules of traditional wasai. Nothing is graded from a fictional Misses 12.
02 / fabric
Traditional tan-mono bolts are 35–38 cm wide. Most fabric in a Western store is 110 cm or wider. The cut chart reorients pieces, splits where it has to, and tells you exactly how much yardage to buy.
03 / honest
No sign-up. No email capture. No "premium tier." Your measurements never leave your browser — the PDF is generated on your device. If this site ever runs ads, they will be small, unobtrusive, and labelled.
How it works
Take seven measurements with a soft tape — height, bust, waist, hip, shoulder, sleeve, and desired hem length. Our measuring guide walks through each one.
Enter your measurements, pick your fabric width and seam allowance, choose a garment style. The tool draws each piece and runs sanity checks on the proportions.
Get a print-ready PDF (A4 or US Letter) with the pattern pieces at true size, a cut chart, and step-by-step sewing instructions written for first-time kimono sewers.
What you get
Not a sketch, not a one-page diagram. A full booklet, ready to print on a home printer.
Sample PDF preview
p.1 Summary
p.2 Body
p.3 Sleeve
p.4 Collar
p.5 Cut chart
p.6 Instructions
Mock preview. Actual PDF rendered live in your browser.
Who this is for
You sew, but you've never made a kimono. The construction is so different from Western patterns that the existing guides feel like they're missing five steps. This site fills them in.
You need a kimono in three weeks, out of whatever 145 cm fabric you can source, on a non-standard body. You want a pattern that respects the structure but bends on width.
You grew up around kimono — or wish you had — and want to sew one yourself, in English, without a YouTube playlist that assumes you already know kuke from hira-mitsu.
From the guides
context
An English-language sewer's field guide to pre-war and Showa-era wasai manuals: the conventions, the abbreviations, the units, and the layouts that make a sixty-year-old kimono book legible — and the few pitfalls that quietly mislead beginners.
10 min read
technique
How wasai builds a growing body into the garment itself: the shoulder tuck (kataage), the waist tuck (koshiage), and why a children's kimono is sewn with deliberate excess that gets let out as the child grows.
11 min read
technique
Araihari, marurai, spot-cleaning, tatōshi paper, naphthalene, humidity, frequency. What you can reasonably do at home, what should go to a professional, and the few mistakes that will quietly ruin a kimono in storage.
11 min read
technique
A hakama is not a skirt and it is not trousers. It is a pleated wrap garment with two structural variants — umanori (divided, horse-riding) and andon (tube, undivided) — each with its own pleat grammar and its own ceremonial weight. Here is how a hakama is built and what each pleat means.
12 min read
technique
A clear-eyed comparison of the trade-offs between hand and machine sewing a kimono — which seams benefit from kuke or hira-mitsu, which can be machined without compromise, and the hybrid approach most contemporary home sewers actually use.
11 min read
technique
The haori is a short overcoat with a kimono cut and three crucial differences: it opens at the front, it does not wrap, and the collar folds outward instead of crossing. Here is how a haori is built, why modern fashion adopted it, and how to sew one over an existing kimono pattern.
11 min read
A note on this project
Komon Lab is the work of one person, built in the open. No VC, no growth hacks, no email lists. Just patterns that work.
If a pattern fails for your body, I want to know. If a guide gets a fact wrong, I want to fix it. The whole point is that the tool gets better every time it meets a real sewer.