I was playing around with hand sewing some patches together from my dyeing experiments. Maybe one day they will form a rag robe.
In the process I thought I would play around with kusis/joins as per the OP.
Firstly, you use up a lot of cloth if you are doing fat flat felled seems… I didn’t have much to spare, so mine are skinny.
Secondly, the kusi doesn’t sit lower/higher than the field. It just steps down from one field to the other. This sort of bugs me. But I guess it’s just my conditioning from seeing Thai style robes.
I don’t really see the advantage in doing the overlapping kusi method. Sure, you can still cut the panels into 5ths/7th… but a skinny joining flat felled seem and a ‘fake seem’ for the other side of the kusi seems like it would use less material and still be as strong?
While stitching I was also wondering what the point on the horizontal kusi was? Could it have been that the width of cloth/loom was such that for an upper robe it was not enough to do a full height and this is the more economical way to draw and cut on the cloth? This seems unlikely as it seems rich lay folks had single pieces of cloth for upper garments. Thoughts?