It drives me nuts too.

I told my then fiancee I was making a kimono kitsuke and his room mate had to show me his new bathrobe, straight from Taiwan, but isn't the gold dragon motif so Japanese?

Uh no... that's not a kimono, you dumb twit... lol...

lol.... but isn't the motif japanese?! i wish they knew that because the design if japnese doesn't mean its a real kimono!

It would have been really funny if the dragon actually was styled in the Chinese style, meaning that there was nothing Japanese about it.

lol true..

That's the worst part - it was a Chinese dragon.

The room mate was a moron anyway in general. Trying to compare his joke to the hiki I sewed & embroidered BY HAND (machine was broken at the time) was a bit of an insult too.

man you hand embroder?! wow thats quite a feat! i could never do that.. maybe my mom but not me.....

I do all sorts of things with fabric and fabric arts... I just wish I could knit and crochet... that's all I can't seem to get the hang off.

Heck, I even know how to weave fabric. Simple stuff, nothing too complicated, but yeah.

Greatest joy in life is wearing my artwork.

WOW!!........

I'm yet another one who hates being bombarded with the shiny bathrobes from Taiwan when I search for kimono on ebay. The guy who mass posts all of the "vintage junoesque yukata" really makes me face-palm. I would always ask myself who would ever buy one of those cheap, mass-produced costumes; until my ex-roommate went and ordered one the very week my first furisode arrived from an Ichiroya auction. She had an example of the real thing right in front of her and STILL spent her money on a piece of crap!

It's just proof that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

The best way, at least for me, to get by these auctions, whilst searching for hidden gems is to simply do an exclusion search. Take the words they use that are odd, like, noble, or junoesque, and use a subtraction mark before them. For instance:

Vintage Kimono, -junoesque, -noble, -shirt, and so on.

But on petpeeves, you guys don't even want to hear about the function I had to go to a week and a half ago for a dance performance on a JAPANESE culture night at an elementry school. :face palm:

Lets hear it!

Exclusion searches! I'm such a noob I didn't even know that those existed!

And I'm with Cortana san, lets hear about that function you attended, it's Halloween, I could use a good horror story!

I made some filters of Ebay searches that remove most of the crap. You can view them here: http://delicious.com/SuperGrouper/ebay_kimono_filters I saved the rss feed of that page as a live bookmark in my FireFox bookmarks toolbar and I use it for searching all of the time. After loading the searches, I can also add other keywords etc.

I've had so many awful search experiences I made a fake Ebay screenshot of THE MOST PERFECTESH KIMONA EVAR:

Click the image to visit the Flickr page and full-view it- it's worth it for the lulz.

I facepalmed. I mean imagine how many people are suckered into buying bathrobes! It's really quite a scam. Plus I have to resist trollin' some of the face paint GEESHA at cons and costume parties.

The most amusing (and irritating) kind of people are those at anime cons who are wearing "kamow-noe". It's especially amusing when I'm wearing a proper yukata, and they're in those flimsy satin bathrobe things, and they look at me like scum because I "wasn't doing it right" XD