Happy 2015!

The sun has risen in the Land of the Rising Sun!  Happy New Year!

I do not stay up to see the new year in but Tetsu and Choco and I went out before the sun was up and we caught the sun rising over... a factory. 

Ah well, the reflections off the mountain was pretty.

We met other neighbors waiting for the sun to rise and with my camera we took the first pictures of the year of each other.  

Playing around with 2015's early morning sun and shadows in the forest.  How old are we?!

Then it was home to eat our breakfast of pounded rice cakes with sea weed, bean paste and soy powder.  And now we are off to church to give God our praises for a wonderful 2014 and request His blessings in 2015.

This is our New Year's card for 2015.  Wishing you the best from the Watanabes!

2014 quilting summary

Thank you for the birthday wishes to my mother.  I did get to talk to her yesterday and also asked my sister-in-law to send me a recent picture.  If (and when) I get that I will post a bit more about Grandma. 

We are winding up the year here already though Tetsu had to go to work today.  I really ought to get off this computer and do some last minute cleaning...  Wash some windows?  Put the Christmas things away?

Before that though I wanted to post another collage, this one of 2014 quilt finishes.  Many of these are small quilts, or medium quilts for hanging on the wall...  6 bed size quilts though...  Let's see...

The two "Bloom where you're planted quilts" went to friends. 
The quilt on the tree was made as a house warming gift.
The cottage scene was a McKenna quilt that a blog friend sent me.
Mi is sitting on the quilt I made for Mr. U, my carpenter.
The Majestic Mountains quilt went to the blog friend who supplied me with boxes of batik fabrics.
The Liberty wall hanging was made from the sampling of fabrics that fell into Mrs. Furui's hands.
The little snowman quilt was another McKenna kit that our patchwork group ordered and split 3 ways.
The Batik Sunset quilt was another house warming gift.
The Cats Meow quilt was actually a group project raffled off at the kindergarten.  (I did my share of the work so I'm including it in "MY" finishes.)
The Storm Watcher quilt is the one I finished last week.
The Sunbonnet Angel wall hanging was a small one made as a birthday gift.
The little paper piecing coffee cups were made on a whim when I wanted to brush up my paper piecing skills.
And the String of Birdhouses wall hanging was another kit that a blog friend sent.

I suppose other things got made this year too.  A knitted vest for Tetsu (he has yet to model that for me), a couple of embroidered pillows.  I regret that I didn't get a quilt made for the Ronald McDonald House this year...  I'll put that on my list of things to do in 2015.  

I still have the Tutti Fruitti quilt blocks on the design wall.

 And I still have the Pine Burr quilt on a quilting hoop.

"Kotoshi mo osewa ni narimashita"

"I am indebted to you this past year."  (Tetsu's friend's calligraphy in black and gold ink.)

Truly.  Thank you for visiting my blog.

Happy Birthday to my mother!

Today my mother is 93.  I will have to see if I can remember to get in touch with her when the time is good for both of us (part of the trials of living in another time zone.)

My mother was born in Chicago, the only child of two immigrant parents from Japan.  The family lived most of their lives in the little town of Columbia City, Indiana where she excelled in schoolwork and in music.  She heard a bit of Japanese when she was very young but for the most part she was brought up in a fully English speaking, all American household.

My mother married late (in those days) and after my brother was born our family moved away to California leaving grandparents in the Midwest.  I wonder how much thought my father and mother gave when they made the decision to move their family half-way across the country.  My mother was the pride and joy of her parents lives, she had given them their only grandchildren... and yet their times together were limited to two weeks at Christmas when my grandparents came to California and to the month in the summer when my mother would take my brother and me back to Columbia City.

And then 20 some years later I took off to go live in Japan and marry here.  Did I give it much thought myself?  My mother had my brother and his family at close hand so maybe I didn't think there would be much pain in the separation.  And for myself, with an exciting new life in Japan with a husband and young children, I didn't give my mother's feelings much thought.

For the first few years my mother would come to Japan and spent a couple weeks with us (in our tiny Japanese apartment) and I would take the children back to California every summer but as my mother grew older she stopped visiting Japan.

Tetsu and I had the discussion the other day about what I will do in the future when my mother is no longer around to visit.  Will I continue to go to California each summer?  Will I stay with Takumi?  Or maybe make it out to Ohio or wherever Leiya settles?

"Well, I suppose I will...  If they invite me..."

I admire my mother for never hinting that she was lonely or that I should be a more dutiful daughter.  She probably never heard such thoughts from her own parents and that was why she could pass her positiveness along to me.  Instead my mother often THANKED me for giving her such a novel insight on my life and Japanese culture through my letters to her.

"My life has been made so much more interesting because you live in Japan."

"Happy Birthday Mother!"

As she is no longer computer literate I think I'll go call her now...  It's still a day early for her but she's happy to hear from me at any time.
 

Fabric postcards

Yesterday, while Tetsu was finishing up the New Year's cards that he was writing, I made my last fabric card of the year for my mother.

I could not get my mind off of snowmen and since the scraps were still all over my sewing room I went ahead and took the easy way out.  It got mailed out with Tetsu's New Year's card (this one in an envelope).

And I also made up a collage of this year's fabric cards...  I started laying them out in some order but couldn't fit them all on one page when laid out by months. 

January --  A cat in a fabric basket
February --  A cat in the snowy woods
March -- Cherry blossoms
April -- A wisteria visitor
May --  Ginko leaves
June --  Socks on the line
July --  Whooo are youuuu?
August  --  Hawaiian hibiscus
September  --  Embroidered jewels
October --  Obaachan's crochet motif
November  --  A mini-sweater
December  --  Let it snow!

Am I going to do this again next year?  It was sort of fun, but then again there was always that deadline pressure...  I never heard if my mother liked getting fabric postcards or not...  She didn't remember any of them when I handed her the bunch I found on the shelf this summer... But at 93 (tomorrow's her birthday!) she must appreciate any type of mail... I am sort of running out of ideas though come to think of it I never really have any ideas until I set my mind to it...

Hmmm...  They make for an nice end of the year collage.

Totoro

The other morning Leiya messaged me saying she wanted me to teach her how to make a Totoro.  And I got on Facetime and proceeded to instruct her on Totoro making...  I love that I can do things with Leiya even though we are separated by countries and ocean.

Leiya said she'd found the Totoro pattern on my blog but the instructions were pretty vague.  I guess so!  I went back to that blog post and can see how it might be difficult to follow...  Well, it wasn't a tutorial, just a picture of the pattern set on my cutting board so that one could get an idea of the size of things.

Anyway, I grabbed some fabric (couldn't find the Totoro template so I made one out of my head on the spur of the moment) and some embroidery thread and giving instructions about running stitches and gathering and applique, led Leiya through the steps of making a Totoro.

Mine is a tall Totoro.  Leiya made a fat one.

Neither one of us had eyes at the time,  By the way, if one forgoes the belly part and adds whiskers instead, you have a cat!  I stuffed mine with batting but alas even the Internet won't let me share some of my left over batting with Leiya.  She stuffed hers with rice.  (Beans will work too.)

My Totoro, complete with eyes a few day later.  I think Leiya said she was going to make three for Christmas presents.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!!!  Joy to the world!  It is already December 26 in Japan and Christmas has come and gone.  But the joy of God's gift remains!

We celebrated Christmas quietly this year...  Though I am on holiday until the first week of the new year, Tetsu is still working.  We had nothing planned for Christmas Eve but Yuma-kun popped in with his grandmother bringing omochi (pounded rice cakes) for New Year's and a quarter of a Christmas cake that Yuma-kun had decorated himself.  So I got to give my favorite jr. high school student a Christmas hug.

And between running errands, I spent quite a bit of time finishing up the Storm Watcher quilt.  YEAH!!!  I have completed my homework and can add one last quilt to the list of quilts made in 2014.

The pieced part of the quilt had been finished a couple of weeks ago.  And the tribulations I had with the quilting I've already told you about.  Was I going to put a snowman on this quilt or not...  Well, I had thought the snowman idea was cute... and the kit supplied fabric for the snowman...  But I wasn't too enthralled with the kit's snowman design.  For one, he was too tall.  Japanese snowmen are only two snowballs high (I didn't realize that but Mrs. Furui and friends asked me if all American snowmen are three snowballs high.  Coming from Southern California I couldn't answer that question.)  And the kit's snowman didn't have a hat (but black fabric was supplied...  I don't know why.)  Well, I could just make my own snowman...  Why not get creative here.

My snowman on the floor.

The instructions suggested appliqueing with a machine button hole stitch... and I did that for the snowman in invisible thread.  But do you know how hard it is to turn a big quilt like this when the machine foot wants to go around those curves?  This is flannel though and I could imagine all the edges fraying if I didn't tack them down at intervals (rather than just raw-edge stitching)  I went back to my freehand curlicues for the rest of the appliques.

This is the back of the quilt on the snowflake.  Curly-curly-curlicues!  There!  That should hold!

I put the quilt up on the wall to photograph it and would you believe, Tetsu didn't even notice it when he came home. 

"Excuse me.  There's a snowman on our wall...  How do you like him?"

Tetsu declared me an adequate snowman designer.

Tatting

Sigh...  Mrs. Furui has gotten me started on another handcraft.  I did NOT need this new distraction to my normally slow quilting!

Mrs. Furui's mother-in-law did tatting and when Mrs. Furui closed up the mother-in-law's room, she came across some tatting samples.  And that's what got Mrs. Furui started.  The rest of us thought,

"Hey!  Isn't that pretty!  That shouldn't be so difficult to do!  I can crochet...  Why not tat!"

And wasn't it convenient that I already had two tatting shuttles in my drawer (which I'd bought from a sale bin years and years ago.)  And wasn't it convenient that I had boxes of my own grandmother's lace crochet thread.  A couple weeks ago when our patchwork group gathered, I decided to give my tatting shuttles a trial run... 

Unfortunately I was battling a cold too and whether I became feverish from the cold or from the tatting, I sat at my corner of the table and refused to participate in conversations, instead focusing on getting my fingers unwound from the tangles of tatting thread.  I gave up early when my friends suggested I needed to go home and treat my cold.

Then last week the patchwork group got together again... this time with everyone clutching their own tatting shuttles.  I couldn't go to this gathering but I called Mrs. Furui later to find out if everyone had mastered the art of tatting and should I just toss my shuttles into the trash and admit that tatting is not going to be my thing.

Mrs. Furui said that it had been a quiet tatting session and everyone now sympathized with my silence while I was concentrating on pushing the tatting shuttles back and forth.  And no, only one previous tatter had made progress...  the rest of the members were still trying to figure out which finger belonged to which hand.

Oh good.  I haven't fallen behind.  I will give tatting another go!  (You didn't know I was so competitive!)

I borrowed Mrs. Furui's tatting book and spent Monday night tatting...  If you can call it that.

 Well!  That obviously was not what I was trying to do.

 Oops...  Another flub...  But wait!  Is that the beginning of a ring?

 Well, no.  Just a lot more flubs.  Oh dear...

 So close!!!

My first tatted motif!  Whew!  That was two days worth of work!

I have now got this pattern down in my head.  It takes me two and a half hours to make a piece of lace the size of my watch face...  I took my tatting to Tetsu's mother's house.

"Are you making something again!  Your hands never rest.  And now what are you going to do with that?  That's not the end is it?"

Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't.  For two days I haven't done any quilting.  I think I need to make up a schedule.  Tatting only on Mondays or something.   I've got to get back to my patchwork and quilting today.

Happy Birthday Obaachan!

December 23rd in Japan is a holiday because it is the Emperor's birthday.  And it also my mother-in-law's birthday so Tetsu and I stopped by with  lunch and cake.  After getting her out twice while Leiya was here we decided we wouldn't nag her on her birthday and we all sat in her small kitchen and celebrated.

Thanks to the fact that Obaachan's birthday is the day before Christmas Eve, all I had to do was order our Christmas cake a day early from the sweet shop lady where I stand for crosswalk duty.  Even though the sweet shop is a Japanese bean paste sweet shop the younger son has his own bakery and I can buy pastries at the shop too.  Only 5 candles on Obaachan's birthday/Christmas cake.  She really turned 90 yesterday.

Obaachan hates to have her picture taken.  I gave her an album of pictures I'd taken with her and Leiya but she has hidden it away in a drawer because she said she doesn't want to look at herself.

"I'm so wrinkled and ugly and old looking."

"Obaachan!  I don't know how many people have told me you are a very elegant looking Obaachan and just beautiful in your 90 year old way.  I hope I can look as nice as you do when I get to 90!"

"I look old."

"You are 90!"

I went off my Whole 30 diet to enjoy a piece of birthday cake with Obaachan.
.

New Year's preparations

I invited Yuma-kun to come with Tetsu and me to a Christmas program at the city center on Saturday night and he jumped at the chance to attend.  It was a huge event with an audience of 1500 people and there was a choir and hand bells and instrumental performances and gospel and even rap.  And of course a Christmas message from the pastor.  Yuma-kun was most interested in the trumpeter as he is playing the trumpet in his school band this year.   I was so pleased that Yuma-kun had a good time at the Christmas program. 

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Yesterday, on the way to church the mist was rising from the fields and forest and gave a ethereal atmosphere to the scenery we drive by daily.

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I have been moaning and groaning about being behind on my holiday duties and finally this week I made up our New Year cards.  This always turns into MY chore because Tetsu doesn't take pictures nor have any idea about how they are organized in the computer (so that one can find them.)  And he also isn't much for using photo software so he's not about to try and make a New Year's card.

But once the cards are made then we both get into the act for addressing them and writing messages, though we seem to have different ideas about how they should be done.  Tetsu wants to sit in front of the TV all through the night on New Year's Eve and address cards.  I say that's too late and besides I can't concentrate with the TV blaring.  I want to go out to a coffee shop and spend a few pleasant hours writing cards and listening to background music and sipping coffee...  Without a cat on my lap.  Tetsu thinks going out in public to address cards is embarrassing but this weekend I won and we ended up at MacDonald's McCafe.

Whereas most people use a PEN to write cards, Tetsu prides himself on his Japanese calligraphy and does his part to make beautiful cards by writing all the address with a brush-pen.  The brush is filled with ink and can be stroked in lesser or greater amounts (making the stroke widths different) depending on the pressure on the brush.

Unfortunately the ink doesn't DRY quickly and Tetsu wrote out his cards and lined them up on the McCafe's window sill to dry.  Which they didn't do so we sat there an extra 30 minutes blowing on them and waving them in the air (talk about embarrassing) and finally blotting them with a lot of McCafe paper napkins.  Hmmm.  Maybe staying at home and writing cards would have been a better idea...  At least I could have gone to bed...

We only made it halfway through the cards...  There's always New Year's Eve left to finish the job...

Christmas quilt finished?

I'm not sure if this can be called a finish or not.  Maybe not.

Mrs. Furui and I have been putting together our respective Storm Watcher quilt kits which are lovely, warm looking quilts made of flannels with snowmnn appliqued on the top.  But Mrs. Furui is considering not even putting the snowman on her quilt and just luxuriating in the soft flannels.  I think that I want to put the snowman on there... after all, that is why the quilt is called Storm Watcher.

At ANY rate, after we worked together basting both quilts we set ourselves the goal to get the top quilted by the end of the year and worry about the snowmen afterwards.  That way we could at least enjoy a Christmasy looking quilt this season and maybe have a new look for next year's Christmas season.  Mrs. Furui was still contemplating hand quilting her flannel quilt but I went ahead and quilted down the seams by machine.

I showed you the progress before with all the freehand curlicues on the seams which was fairly successful.  I used sparkly silver thread which is a wonderful touch but I never did get the tension just right and the back of the curlicues pull at the tight curves...  Not much but enough that the quilt police wouldn't give the quilting a high grade!  And for a final finish I quilted down the binding instead of hand stitching it.  I wanted that last bit of trim on the edge of the border.  But I paid for it because there was way too much fabric thickness for that finicky sparkle thread and it broke every few inches or so all the way around the edge.  That wasn't unexpected but there are "rats' nests" every few inches on the back (that I did my best to hide by burying the threads when I could).

The quilt is finished, and quilted and bound.  It hasn't been washed yet (shhh...) but I will do that today or tomorrow.  It looks very nice amongst the other Christmas decorations here and there around the house.  As for the snowman, well, I'm ready to start on him too...  except that I can't find the dang pattern!  I wonder if I left it at Mrs. Furui's house or if it got tossed in a box when I did some surface cleaning last week...  As I say, this could be called a finish for this year the way it is...

But it can't be called the Storm Watcher Quilt yet.

Yuma-kun's tote bag

Yuma-kun has been busy up in my sewing room again.  Does he really like to sew that much or does he just want to get out of studying English?  We get one project finished and he claims he "needs" to make something else.  And I am such a sucker for his pleas...  A couple weeks ago he wanted to make a tote bag for his trumpet music.  I have NO ideas for a music bag, nor any musical fabric and do I really have to be able to pull projects out of the corners of my brain in a matter of minutes.  It seems that Yuma-kun thinks I can, so I try to oblige.

A couple of years ago I spent a few days in the summer teaching my nephew how to paper piece.  I find paper piecing challenging, in a good way, and I thought a young boy, while he might not like the sewing part, might find the puzzling, construction part of paper piecing interesting.  The project with my nephew was successful so at a drop of the hat I went to the Paper Panache website and found a free pattern that Yuma-kun seemed to like.  Not musical but this was the best I could do...

"Take it or leave it!"

Yuma-kun took up the challenge.

Now to be honest here, I don't think my nephew nor Yuma-kun really understood the method of paper piecing.  It was more like me lining up pieces and paper and telling Yuma-kun to sew in a straight line.  And then I'd cut off the seam allowance and get fabric lined up again.  I don't think Yum-kun really cared about what we were doing until the end when he could visualize the strange pieces being connected to make a figure of...  A lizard!

"Wow!  All that strange sewing makes something!"

It took two weeks to make the lizard part and if I had been smart I would have enlarged the pattern to make it easier to sew those tiny little pieces.  It was touch and go whether some of those pieces were going to get lost in any mismatched seam allowances.

And then last week Yuma-kun sewed up the bag and last night HE put on the handles himself.  He understands the technique enough that I could just leave him the handles and explain how to secure them and then I went downstairs to cook dinner leaving him at the sewing machine.

"Good job, Yuma-kun!  We've still got 30 minutes to do some studying."

"No, I want to make a quilt for the school's music room.  It really needs some color."

More projects to pull out of my brain at a drop of a hat.