Going offline for awhile

Other people like spring and for the flowers and greenery, I do too.  But I hate this season because of the abandoned kittens that people leave.

A couple weeks ago we found a box of dead kittens in the forest behind us.  I came nearly undone but managed to keep busy and think of other things.  I have avoided the road just because I remember the shock of looking down into that box.  I was somewhat proud that I didn't lose it altogether and was able to carry on.  There have been times when I am really inconsolable and unapproachable.   Recently I've mustered up courage to take Choco back down that road on our morning and afternoon walks and that was where we were this morning.

Another kitten... run over.  I am drifting into the dark, unreasonable mood that I can get into when something involved with an animal sets me off.  I am angry at the stupidity of people who don't neuter their animals and I'm furious with the cruelty humans have to leave those creatures at the mercy of cars and crows and starvation. 

The only positive thing I can think of is that I didn't have to bring back another kitten to take care of.

I hate myself for that thought too.

I think I'll stay offline until I can be more cheerful again.

Not me..

Guess who fell off his bicycle and broke his wrist...

Last week I got a phone call from Yuma-kun's grandmother saying that he'd be absent from English because he was in the hospital.  And yesterday he was back telling me about how he'd tried to swerve around another bicycle rider on his way to school (the other rider was fooling around) and they'd collided.  So now Yuma-kun has a bolt in his wrist and is being driven back and forth to school by his grandmother...  Poor grandmother.  Poor Yuma-kun.

He actually doesn't seem worse for the wear.  Out of the hospital in two days, enjoying an outing with his uncle over the weekend.  But he didn't want to do English last night (that's pretty normal too) and we sewed instead.  If he can do it I'm willing to let him use my sewing room...

Wordless Wednesday

A quilt exhibition

Tetsu found us another small quilt exhibition to visit the other day.  He must find these notices in the newspaper (which I don't read) and then shuttles me off not knowing anything about where we are going until we walk in the door.  This was a small group exhibition of mainly traditional quilts.

Tetsu asks for my opinions on the quilts we see but his grading level is "easy" or "difficult".  Could I make the same quilt or couldn't I?  I have been to "artistic" quilt shows with one of a kind quilts and I've been to traditional shows with very familiar quilt patterns.  Either way, in Japan quilts are nearly all hand pieced and hand quilted so though I suppose I COULD make some of these patterns, I can think of easier ways by using the sewing machine. 

I really liked this quilt... the colors, the lay out... the quilting... but you'd never see me piecing it by hand!  I photographed it in case I get ambitious and want to figure out how to do it by machine someday.

Here is another absolutely beautiful quilt (and I have made a tiny version of this), the Storm at Sea pattern!  The use of colors was just lovely! 

And this is a sample of the minute hand quilting in the border.  Just exquisite!

In fact, the quilting on all the quilts was outstanding.  It makes me want to rethink my hand quilting efforts...  But think of the time involved!

This was one of the few "Japanese" looking quilts at the exhibit.  A wonderful sampling of kimonos made from real silk kimono scraps.  The maker did a wonderful job of piecing each kimono so that the designs on the silk matched on the kimono pieces.  (Not too in focus was that...  Sorry about that.  It is not your eyes).

There was also a corner of bags and tapestries that were being sold and this was one of the more Japanese looking pieces.  I don't know about the camellias appliqued there but the background fabric is definitely from a dark woven kimono.

And this was the sole "artistic" quilt in the show.  It was such a beautiful, vibrant expression of flying cranes.  I liked the use of fabric in the border too which is a beautiful hand dyed fabric that I have seen in Japan.  In this case it was used on the bias and that alone would be a challenge!

A couple finishes and a flimsy

A couple of us are making progress on our quilts...  Rumi-san and Mrs. N. came over on Friday and worked on new projects and old.

Although I'm not much good at any sewing other than patchwork and quilting, together, Rumi-san and I got down to the nitty-gritty of making a cushion and put in a zipper to the piece she had been working on.  The blue fabric is a beautiful Thai silk piece that I had which was a real bear to sew through but Rumi-san persevered with the applique and then with the machine quilting.

Rumi-san also finished her hand quilting on the New Testament quilt that has been in the making for a couple of years.  A great finish there too!

Oops.  I forgot to get a picture of Mrs. N. working very hard at free hand motion quilting her VERY large bed cover quilt.  That is going to take a couple of months though so I'm sure I'll have another chance to photograph her hard work next month...

And for myself... well, my Reflections quilt is now a flimsy and ready for some basting.  I hate to ask my patchwork friends to help me again with that job so I'll probably do it with boards later this week.  Mrs. N didn't want to bother with crawling around on the floor or taking up all of the dining room table for basting her quilt so we SPRAY basted it!  A costly way to do it but she splurged and we had her quilt basted within minutes.  Tempting...  Here is my flimsy down on the floor...

 And up on my new design board.  Just fits!

Sunday morning hike

Tetsu and Choco and I took a unplanned hike this morning.  Choco decided we needed to go for a walk at 5:30 am this morning and as we started out Tetsu suggested we drive over to the hills nearby and walk up behind the temple there.  In the 25 years of living here, though I've always known there is a hiking course, I've never been up it myself.

So instead of walking the 30 minutes over to the temple, we drove over just as the temple gong was ringing out 6:00 am.  Even from our house in the mornings we can hear the gong ringing out over the countryside and though it conjures up the image of a robe-clad monk meditatively striking a large bronze bell, actually the ringing is a recording.  Oh well... the kindergarten church's bell chimes are a recording too...

Anyway, we started up the temple's walking path that headed upwards into the forest.  The path was well marked especially as there are 88 small stone statues along the way guiding hikers...  Each statue had a offering sieve in front of it and I think the custom is to put pennies in each of the cups as you hike up and back down the mountain...

It is interesting to me that at the top of the mountain there is a Shinto shrine.  Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines reside besides each other cooperatively and one doesn't really know which area of the sacred grounds are which.  This is true at the major temple/shrine areas as well as in homes where the family will have a Shinto altar directly over the family's Buddhist altar.  Choco was pooped after her hike up the mountain (as were Tetsu and me... swimming and hiking use different muscles.)

Although the morning wasn't very clear, this is a shot of the countryside where I live...  Our house is probably off to the right there past the river and behind the trees somewhere.  We arrived back at the temple parking lot by a bit after 7:00 so it wasn't a very strenuous hike.  I know that some of the neighborhood children will make the hike and draw out maps and take pictures of the statues as part of their summer independent study.  I'll have to ask if my own children have ever gone up there.

Recycling

Let's see.  I got quite a lot done yesterday morning.  I'm rather proud of my solution to my design board problem.

Remember my mini room renovation in March?  I had gotten rid of the paper screens in our Japanese room and put in curtains in hopes that the room would brighten up a bit.  Well, those screens were hauled upstairs and stacked against a wall waiting for someone to break them apart... or find a better use for them.  Well, I found a better use!

So here is a screen, it is pretty stained and the paper has claw marks on it.  I'm pretty sure the stains were from winter window condensations... not from a cat, so I left the paper as it...

I went out and bought 6 yards of flannel and sewed them together into two panels and yesterday I staple-gunned the panels to the back side of two of the larger screens.  On the other side (now the backside), the paper is recessed anyway and with a few nails hammered into the wall, the screens "rest" on the nails.  The two screens are not connected and they could be lifted down separately if needed (though I don't know why I'd need to).

Now I have a VERY large space to arrange my blocks...  I also have two smaller paper screens still stacked against the wall.  Hmmm...  How many design boards to I need?

Heavily quilted

Thank you for all your advice yesterday.  I will check out what we have in the way of Red Yeast and Garlic capsules here in Japan...

Heading into the end of May I needed to get a fabric post card made for my mother again.  (Still no word about whether she LIKES getting my monthly fabric cards).  For a change I wanted to do one completely quilted.  I thought about feathers and spirals but chose to use different colored threads and "sketch" some ginko leaves.

On plain yellow fabric with dark green thread I quilted in the outline of a leaf or two and then I changed to some pastel shimmery Sulky thread and added other lines and leaf veins.  And finally I got out the Sulky variegated yellow thread and quilted in pebbles around the leaves.
I don't think I've ever quilted anything so densely and this was a good place to try...  Think of all the thread that gets used when filler-quilting on large quilts as many quilters do.  I will get this off today and hopefully it will be added to my mother's refrigerator gallery.

Annoyed

Hmmm.  One of the few days when I don't have photos or something I want to write about...  Let's see... What have I been thinking about lately?

I absolutely hate thinking about health issues.  I am a lousy nurse and a lousy patient.  As I approach 60 I  ponder why it takes so much effort just to keep this body going at a even keel.  Why do I spend so much time counting how many laps I'm swimming, how many steps I'm walking, how many calories I'm consuming?  And that's just staying healthy!  When something gets out of kilter then one has to take into consideration which doctor might be best, what are the side effects of medicine, whether the recent ache is going to get out of hand or not.

I started taking that dang toenail medicine which I didn't want to take in the first place.  Just figuring out which doctor I should go to took a few days but I chose a dermatologist not too far away...  Hmmm...  He's okay I guess...  He wanted blood for checking liver function.  Great!  Take all the blood you want!  I've got great blood!

At least that's what I thought...  I mean... How many times has Tetsu told me to ignore the fact that I'm not losing weight by swimming because think what wonderful things it is doing for my blood!  So I pulled up my sleeve, got poked and went home whistling that the next week I was going to be complimented on my wonderfully healthy blood.

Not so.

"Well, you have extremely high cholesterol levels.  Those needs to be controlled by medication."

I sputtered and fumed.

"But I do all this dang swimming and walking!  I'm not a meat eater!  I sure don't want to start on some MORE medicine!"

"So sorry, but that's what the numbers say.  You can try all you like to control your cholesterol by exercise and diet but in the end you're going to have to take medication.  Especially with this toe nail medicine.  That will just make the cholesterol worse."

I was NOT happy and told the doctor I'd think about it...  Already I was thinking I'd stop coming to that doctor and find one I could reason with...

So Tetsu took me HIS doctor.  And I was told the same thing.  Well, I'm not too thrilled with THIS doctor's "bedside" manner either.  He didn't care about what my lifestyle is or my efforts or my philosophy about natural living etc. etc.

"You are almost 60.  Too bad.  It is probably in your genes." 

I have threatened Tetsu that maybe I'll go purely natural, refuse to see any more doctors at all and avoid old age altogether.

Annoyed and stubborn.

Rice fields

In the early morning (like 6:00 am) we walk with Choco past rice fields and vegetable fields.  The rice fields are now all basically flooded because the farmers rev up their tractors the first week of May. 

Japan, if nothing else, is blessed with WATER and everywhere we look we are surrounded by streams and rivers and trenches and flooded fields.  Though not at the corner of every rice field, here and there on the landscape are little sheds that shelter pumps and wells.  The water is brought up from underground and let into a field and when one field is full a trench will let the overflow go into another field.  In the mornings the farmers all come round to check their fields and to see if they need to open up a trench or not.

A rice field tractor with a load of sprigs ready to be planted.  The tractor makes nice even lines of rice plants in the fields but along the edges the farmers will still wade into the mud and plant by hand.

A flat of rice sprouts drawing up water from the field before being planted.

I missed the rice planting class this year at the elementary school.  Here is the post for last year...

So now the fields are feathery green with ducks swimming between the rows of rice.  In a few weeks the whole countryside will be a carpet of green!
 

Twelve Days

Do these pictures even show up in a blog post?  I have been photographing bamboo shoots.  Bamboo may not be very interesting, but the shoots do grow very fast.  It seems that within days the shoots are brushing the sky...  How fast DO bamboo shoots grow?  I decided to spend a week photographing a bamboo shoot.

Every morning I park my car across the street from the elementary school and next to a bamboo grove...  Ah... Here is a shoot that is barely poking its sprongs from the ground.  And everyday, at the same time, I have photographed the same area watching the bamboo grow.  Before long there were other shoots making an appearance around the car too.  So here we have twelve days in the life of a bamboo shoot.  (No photos on the weekends.)

Starting at the left hand upper corner...  There is hardly anything there.  A small knob in the foreground but I was really aiming at a shoot next to an already grown bamboo pole on the left.  A red traffic cone in the distance and a parking sign on the right...  By day two a bit of a shoot could be seen next to the pole...  Days three and four were Saturday and Sunday so I didn't go to the school...  By day five both shoots were pushing upward...  Day six, day seven, slow but steady....  Day eight, wow a real growth spurt!  And a new shoot there in front...  Day nine, growing so fast that I can hardly keep up with it!  Day twelve, after a weekend, this is about as much of the shoot as I can get into a picture frame.

And this collage was just close up shots of the same bamboo shoot.

Well, that was interesting.  I am reminded of my kids' Science projects in elementary school.

Second generation

I received a surprise e-mail the other day from someone the son of my college roommate (whom I did get to spend time with a couple of years ago).  He sent me a few pictures of his daughter... on a quilt!  Or is that a mat? 

The "whatever" was a quilt I had made for my former roommate when I had first started quilting, though I suppose it can't really be considered quilting.  I was newly married, no children yet, and I had time on my hands.  I must have found a pattern in some Japanese sewing book that I still couldn't read...  and attempted to make a quilt looking at the diagrams and the measurements all in centimeters.  Although this wasn't a "quilted" quilt, around the same time I was trying to hand quilt things and instead of using batting (which I had never heard about) I pulled apart cushion stuffing and tried to lay it flat!  You can imagine some of the disasters that I made!

This "quilt" was made in parts I'm pretty sure and I stuffed each part from the back.  However having no one to teach me, and not really understanding the instructions I was wading through, and probably with the same cushion stuffing that I'd already been using as batting, I STUFFED and STUFFED  and STUFFED until I had... a mattress?  Certainly no baby would ever be put to bed UNDER that quilt as I recall it weighed quite a bit...  A good place to fall though.  Someone could have dropped an egg from the roof onto it with no harm done.

So... not my greatest "quilt".  But look!!!  The mattress is going through a second generation!  Hey, that is really good wear!  It must be 31~32 years old by now...  You can't believe how tickled I am to see what I thought was a flop being put to good use again!

Night scenes

Last night I made my first attempt to use a tripod and photograph night scenes.  A tripod has way too many levers and screws and knobs for me to figure out.  But for some reason we had a very old tripod around and Tetsu found an newspaper information blurb announcing that a local tourist site was having an evening three hour open-to-the-public special event.  Armed with the tripod that I still didn't know how to use, I took pictures to my heart's content.

The park we visited is called Tobu World Square and it is full of miniatures of architecture from all over the world.  Last night only the Japanese part of the square was lit and open to the public but it was enough to enjoy sites familiar to Japanese.  On a nice day, one can spend quite a few hours visiting New York, the White House, the Great Wall, Buckingham Palace, the Taj Mahal, the Vatican and the Egyptian pyramids to name just a few places!  This piece of architecture is Japan's Sky Tree that opened in Tokyo in 2011.  It is the tallest tower (not the tallest structure) in the world.  I haven't seen the real thing.

 I love looking at the little miniature people.  I can always imagine some story going on with the figures.

 Everything in the park is scaled to 25th real life size.

 Some shots are unique to Tobu World Square...  A farmhouse with the Sky Tree in the distance.

 Or the Nagoya Castle which is actually located in Nagoya, nowhere near the real Sky Tree.

This is a model of the Todai temple in Nara (which I visited last year, but didn't get to see at night.)

And here is another temple, in Kyoto, which I'll probably never see at night.

There was also a nice rhododendron section that was beautiful to walk through.

But I still liked the miniature towns the best.  Here is Tetsu's finger trying to give you an idea of the scale...

But he had no idea what I was trying to photograph and kept taking his hand away before the shutter closed (on very slow shutter speed) and this resulted in a ghostly image of his hand!  Well, that's an interesting effect!

By 8:00 the park was closing and I had gotten a good lesson on how to use my tripod and camera settings.