New floors

My three upstairs rooms got their floors completed this weekend.  And Tetsu and I spent all evening Saturday moving things back to their original places and disposing of clutter. 

It was a big job but my sewing room is now usable again.  Now to find the time to use it!  Look at those beautiful pink cherry-wood floors!

I feel like our bedroom really shows off the quilts now too.  This weekend we are having guests and they will be sleeping in this room.  I'm very glad that though the rest of the house may be torn up, that this room will be fresh and cheery.  The third room, Takumi's old room, still has carpenter tools and displaced bookshelves in it.  I'll get a picture of it for Takumi when it is all put back together too.

One embarrassment for me however has been the carpenter/friend realizing and pointing out the cat peeing problem we have.  As the carpenter tears up carpets he can see and smell the result of many soakings.  That was why we were using carpet tiles in so many places throughout the house... so that they could be taken out and washed.  But the hallway and stairway had built in carpet which just got more and more disgusting over the 25 years.  With the removal of the carpeting we are hoping that the cats (or it may just be Cleo) will no longer gravitate to the same spots...  I try to keep a clean house and downstairs guests may not guess the scale of the problem, but a carpenter who tears up carpets and moves furniture sees all the places that this housewife has never touched.  I feel laid bare!

This week the upstairs hallway and stairway are getting facelifts!

An important explanation

A bit before summer, Mr. Furui, PROFESSOR Furui, asked me to check his physics paper/poster presentation for a scientific conference he had been invited to attend in Switzerland.  He and I spent about half an hour going over his paper/poster.  Are you not surprised to hear that I understood about 1/10 of what the paper said?  The paper was all in nearly perfect English but what with the scientific vocabulary and mathematical formulas, I was skipping through and mumbling every other word as I didn't even know how to pronounce most of the information.  Maybe I caught a couple misprints but besides that I didn't add much to the presentation.  I went on my way to California a few days later, and Professor Furui flew off to Switzerland to give his presentation.

This week when I was visiting Mrs. Furui, Professor Furui presented me with a T-shirt that he'd bought for me at the CERN European Organization For Nuclear Research to thank me for my "help".

 "Thank you!  What does it say?"

I quote.

"This is the Unified Theory formula that explains everything in the world.  There are four major interactions, Electromagnetic, Strong, Weak and Gravitational.  This formula shows the electromagnetic, strong and weak....''

Professor Furui continued to explain to me the symbols and meanings etc. but for a formula that explains everything in the world, I'm afraid I didn't understand very much...

I am greatly honored to receive a gift from Professor Furui though.  I wonder how many physicists are going to compliment me on my T-shirt.

Early Christmas decorating!

This summer I found Hobby Lobby (and JoAnns and Michaels) full of Christmas things already.  As I browsed I came across boxes of clear glass ornament balls. 

"Ahh...  Wouldn't those be nice to fill with pretty nothings?  But there is no way I'm going to be able to get glass balls back to Japan.  I'll have to give up THAT idea."

But a few aisles down, low and behold, acrylic clear balls that looked almost exactly like the glass!  My heart went pitter-pat as I had just put aside my idea of creating with the glass balls.

"I can take acrylic balls back to Japan!"

I sort of went crazy and bought out the whole shelf (about 10 balls) all the while thinking what great souvenirs they were going to make for my patchwork friends!

Of course once I got back home I looked at the sack of balls and wondered WHY I'd bought them.  One ball in itself doesn't look like much... And filling them?  What could they be filled with?  My friends were going to think I was nuts when I handed them a fake clear Christmas ball...  I somewhat regretted my rash buying spree.

Back in Japan I let Mrs. Furui know I'd bought acrylic balls for our group.

"You are going to have to help me come up with a good idea for using them or I'm going to be the laughing stock of the patchwork group."

Yesterday at patchwork I brought out my sack of acrylic balls and hesitantly poured them out on the table.

"We can fill them with something?  Maybe...?"  I was very apologetic about my summer souvenirs...

Well, Mrs. Furui saved the day.  Out came bits and pieces of ribbon and lace and tatting experiments and decorative threads and beads and sequins and crystals and left over Liberty fabric scraps.  We had a FANTASTIC time filling our acrylic balls!

Most of us started off with scraps of organza that we prodded into the balls.  I'll have you know that the organza scraps were left over from tea bags that we can get in Japan.  In this case the tea had passed the expiration date and Mrs. Furui just cut open the bags and saved the fabric.  She has been known to save USED tea bags too, which have a lovely golden hue to them...

Some people glued little sequins onto scraps of ribbon.

In my case I just tossed in some sequins with my ribbon and string and they sank to the bottom... but viewing the ball from below the sequins give a nice bit of color.

Mrs. Furui pushed in a couple small tatted flowers that she had made... These were just her first attempts at tatting and she hadn't had any idea about what she was going to do with them.  I'd say she's found a good outlet for her new skill!

Let's see..  The third one from the left is filled with scraps of Liberty fabric along with the organza. 

As other members arrived everyone grabbed an ornament and set to work filling it.  When I left 6 had been completed and two more were in the making.

They all looked so nice in Mrs. Furui's window that we are letting them hang there for awhile.  Maybe we'll get around to taking our own creations home when it gets closer to Christmas. 

I'm relieved that my summer souvenirs were a success!

On the sewing machine (a bit)

I couldn't stand it!  I absolutely HAD to get on my sewing machine!

August is winding up and I still hadn't made a fabric post card for my mother... 

But the sewing room is one grand mess and there was no way I was going to be able to sew in it.  I dug my sewing machine out from one of the piles and moved it down to the dining room.  I found my scrap basket and started pawing around blindly until I came up with some suitable scraps.  And yesterday I played around until I had something that looked summery. 

Not too original (I've done the overall pebbles before on one of the cards) but with time and materials (and ideas) at a minimum I fashioned August's card fairly quickly.  This will go in the mail today or tomorrow.

By the way, the last week that I was in California, the JUNE fabric postcard arrived in my mother's mailbox!  I had mailed it the second or third week of June but neither Marcy nor Grandma could remember seeing it (if it had just been Grandma I would have figured the post card had arrived and been lost in her apartment, but Marcy?)

July's post card had already arrived so I'd given up hoping that the June one would ever get there.  But nearly two months later... there it sat in the mailbox!  I guess I won't try sending post cards in a transparent home-made envelope again.  So my mother has a full set now.  I still don't really know if she likes getting post cards.  They are admired and then lost in her desk clutter.

Hot and cold

The weather seems to be going strange all over the world and in Japan the rains have been devastating in some places.  Last week we were STEAMING (as opposed to roasting because of all the humidity) and even Mr. U, my carpenter was changing shirts 3 or 4 times a day.  Today however we are cool, bordering on cold.  I'm wearing a sweatshirt this morning.

When it is hot the cats look miserable.  They hunt out cool places and are most appreciative of air conditioning.  Toi and Patora, out in the cat house, have their sleeping places protected by reed screens but they are definitely suffering.  Here is Toi from his topmost seat looking like he couldn't care less what goes on around him.

 "Anybody have an ice cube?"

On the cooler days I love the way the clouds seem to be born in the hills around us.  I can watch them form and lift into the sky in the early morning when I am walking Choco.  One after the other they drift upward as they are replaced by new clouds being formed around the farms and foothills.

At the beginning of July the rice fields didn't have rice yet but a month goes by and the heads of the stalks are bending low with the weight of the grain.  Here and there are little blue flowers that thrive on moisture and damp soil.

I was a bit sad to come home to find a block of forest cut down along our walking road.  The farmer who owns the land must have his reasons but I find cut down trees so sad.  I wonder if something will be built here or not.  So far the logs are just lying around here and there...

But there are always pretty things to find around me too.  I came across a vine of perfectly shaped heart leaves.  Too bad it isn't Valentine's Day!

Almost Wordless Wednesday

Mrs. Furui sent me a picture of the large Liberty quilt that our group has been making for months.  The Liberty fabrics (I mean hundreds of cuts of Liberty fabrics!) had been donated to the hospital by someone and Mrs. Furui rescued them when she found out a group was planning to make pot holders out of them.  Our group proceeded to cut up bricks of fabric and started in making this quilt from a pattern in a Japanese book (we liked the zig-zag bottom )  We also made up a smaller quilt for the fabric donor and many of us bought bricks (to give as a donation back to the hospital) to make our own smaller quilts... 

Sometime during the summer Mrs. Furui put the finishing touches on the binding and got the quilt hung in the hospital waiting room.  I haven't seen the finished quilt in person yet but Mrs. Furui who goes weekly to the hospital as a volunteer photographed the quilt for me.

Wow!  I was so pleased with my own small Liberty quilt but this large one with so many different fabrics really is stunning!  Liberty sure does make beautiful fabrics.  And they are so nice to pet and sew too!

Carpentry progress

Yesterday was the first workday for me after summer vacation.  I was back at the crosswalk at 7:30 and off to the preschool at 9:30.  I stopped off at Mrs. Furui's to pick up something forgotten, bought a couple of bags of Japanese pears, swam laps for 30 minutes, did the grocery shopping and came home to Mr. U who was struggling with the last few floor boards in the second room that he has been doing.

Our house was labeled a "Canadian house" but I think the Canadian is only as far as the label.  In any event, it is a "strange" house because it has odd angles and no doors between rooms.  (The upstairs has doors going in and out of the bedrooms but the downstairs just flows from entryway to living room to dining room to kitchen.)  The odd angles are giving Mr. U headaches.

"It doesn't have to be perfect, only Tetsu and I will see the corners anyway."

"That's not the way these things work.  It has to be done right."

Mr. U pride does not allow for a ship-shod job.  Which I should be very grateful for but I feel very sorry for him.  Just as Mr. U shakes his head at some of the odd procedures the original builders used when building this house, he does not want another carpenter 30 years down the line to remark that the carpenter who did repairs (Mr. U) was a haphazard builder.  I guess the "better done than perfect" quilter's philosophy doesn't apply to carpentry.

Working until 7:00 pm, the second room's floor is now in!  But I'm not moved back in yet...  Another room and a hallway and a stairway to go still.

Besides sharpening my kitchen knives for me, Mr. U asked if I had some scissors that didn't cut well.  At first I thought he'd forgotten his own scissors and needed a pair to cut his rope or something.  I handed him some blunt children's scissors but when I realized he was planning to sharpen them I cried out.

"Wait!  You mean REAL scissors?!  I've got lots of real scissors!"

In all the mess of my upturned sewing room I managed to find three pairs of fabric cutting scissors and a pair of embroidery scissors that Mr. U promptly sharpened for me.  He will be around for another month or so and I'm sure I have a few more pairs of scissors for him if I can only find them!
 

Left over summer photos

I figure you may be tired of Japanese carpentry by now but the remodeling is going to last a couple of months so this may be the flavor of my blog for awhile.  And as mentioned before, I can't use my sewing room so not much sewing getting done.

I seem to have a few pictures left over from the summer that I couldn't post the last day in the going-to-the-airport rush and then during the computer breakdown.  These are all 10 days history now but here they are.

This was as far as I got on the toothbrush rug that I was making.  Not quite a rug yet.  That last rim of brownish fabric was two yards of cheapy stuff for $4 a yard.  Even so, to make a rug it still is going to take a lot of fabric.  I left this in the States thinking that maybe next year I'll go looking for old sheets.

 Simba thought the rug was just the right size for a cat.  He was enjoying scratching at it already.

 "Just finish it off and leave it for me, Auntie Tani!"

One of my mother's greatest joys is Sadie-dog.  My mother has always loved all animals and she feels so honored when the cats and dogs come to sit with her.  She goes into peals of laughter though at Sadie who will "sit pretty" when asked...  Or even when not asked.  Sadie comes alongside Grandma and sits up on her hind legs and my mother is absolutely delighted.

"Look at this sweet doggie.  You don't even have to ask her to sit and she will.  Isn't she cute?"

Of course each and every time Sadie sits pretty, to my mother it all seems new again and the rest of the family gets called to come and admire Sadie's cleverness again and again.  Sadie laps up the praise and adoration from Grandma.

 These two are so good for each other.  I left Grandma in good hands (paws).
 

One room down!

Mr. U finished up my sewing room yesterday. 

I watched him pound the last board in...  And my mini-sewing shelf fell down on his hand!  My fault!  I'd hung the shelf up with thumbtacks!  The first blood shed in my new sewing room! (As opposed to stabbing myself with a needle)  Today, before Mr. U started on Takumi's old room I removed all hanging things from the walls.

As is common for all workman and Japanese in general, 10:00 am and 3:00 pm are break times.  Usually the wife of the house will carry up some small snack or cold drink, but in my case, at least this week while I'm not working, Mr. U and I take our break together... and chat.  I asked Mr. U to unroll his tool packs so that I could photograph them.  He had lots to tell me about his well-used tools... 

This one is used with a hammer, that one is used for a concave curve, etc. etc.  Some he has had custom made for certain jobs.

He also explained about how he sharpens his tools.  Originally those two tools on the floor were the same length!  All the sharpenings have honed one down more than the other.  While we were talking about sharpening, Mr. U offered to sharpen my kitchen knives for me and when he went home (hand band-aided) he took home one of my two kitchen knives to sharpen.  He brought it back for me this morning and said he'd take the other one home with him this evening.  (Both gone at the same time and I can't cook dinner!)

Today it is Saturday already in Japan and Tetsu is home so he helped Mr. U lower (by crane) the two wardrobes we had in the room.  We are going to do some major decluttering and getting rid of the cupboards that seem to just hold a lot of junk is part of the process.  Everything else that was in this room has been crammed into the sewing room that was just finished so that room's not photograph-able yet.   

 The faded old carpet before Mr. U removes it in pieces.

 Going, going, gone!

 And Tetsu is in the yard busting up the old wardrobes.  Everyone's busy! 
 

Japanese carpentry

My workman, Mr. U is already hard at work upstairs.  It is 8:30am. 

This is what the floor looked like with the furniture and carpet tiles removed.

I have no idea what might be unique to Japanese carpentry and what might be common all over the world, but I'm taking pictures for our own family to look back on so bear with me.

I'm pretty sure this is a ruler only used in Japan.  Mr. U seemed to think so as only older carpenters still use these measurements call 'sun'.  You and I might think that those are inch increments, (even to my eyes those are not centimeter increments) but they are not.  One 'sun' is 1.19 inches.  Mr. U demonstrated how he can get angle measurement using his 'sun' ruler but I didn't really understand all that. I even brought out a couple of my quilters' rulers in inches and centimeters to compare.

Japanese also use the word 'jyo' as the unit of measurement for rooms...  My sewing room is a bit more than 6 'jyo'... The bit more is what is giving Mr. U headaches.  Though we didn't build our house to begin with, it was designed by a Canadian company and there are odd angles and room widths that make repairs difficult.

Mr. U is using a myriad of carpenter tools to shape and notch some of the wood panels.  He says he has hundreds of these tools and he brings along 20 or so on any given day depending on the work to be done.

 Banging away at something.

Of course when anyone comes into a Japanese house they remove their shoes and leave them at the front door but Mr. U then goes into the room he's working on and wears these work shoes.  He makes sure never to wear them outside of the room... so to leave wood chips and dust behind I suppose.  Can you see Mi's silhouette there in the upper corner?  A couple of the cats are very curious about what is going on (Mi included) a couple of the cats are hiding out under the sofa (Cleo).

At the end of the day the hard part is done (around the door).  How do you think my pink cherry wood floor is going to work out?