Wrapping up the month...

July was a dilly because of the heat and because of it, not a lot got done.  I gave up walking to the school the last week before summer vacation and so I'm not getting much exercise at all...  Covid has hit Japan hard and even Tetsu, the die-hard "let's go to the pool" (for the bath, not so much for the swimming) has shaken his head to being in a public place with people we don't know.  Our eating habits have plummeted because the only thing that sounds good are ice-cream and popcicles and munchies...  I'm all for closing up the cooking side of the kitchen in this heat!!

We have some pretty rough thunder and lightning storms with sheets of rain and once last week our part of the city lost power for about three hours!  No air-conditioning or even electric fan with the electricity off, and we had to have all the windows closed because of the rain pelting the windows...  I tell you!  It was like a sauna inside!!!  Tetsu heroically saved the popcicles before they melted by heating a couple of them... but luckily the electricity came back on before anything else had to be consumed...

The storms make for some beautiful sunsets though and so a couple of evenings we were hanging out the windows with our cameras to take pictures!

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Luka update!  Luka is a little more than a year and a half now and he is having some great experiences!  

The neighborhood deer come for a visit.  (The deer is in the right corner.)

Luka loves the pots and pans drawer.  (Of course!)

The family got to a very nice aquarium.

And Luka also got to the zoo!

I have no idea where this was taken but it's a pretty cute picture.

And Luka has started swim lessons!  That's very exciting.

My Indiana family.

Songbird's Garden Quilt Finished!

I have a new quilt completed and it went pretty quickly!  Sometime at the beginning of the year Leiya mentioned that she'd seen a quilt that she liked and I immediately ordered the kit and had it sent to her house knowing that I would see her in April.  When we got to Indiana in April she had misplaced the package and it wasn't until the last day there that she discovered it in her closet and gave it to me to take back to Japan.  So I started cutting and sewing this quilt from May after we came back from our three week stay in the States.

The quilt is called Songbird's Garden and it is a Windham's Fabric collection kit.

Although I had some cutting issues with triangle sizes, I was able to get the quilt into one piece (with a bit of editing) and I chose not to try to do an overall quilting stitch nor get involved with stippling.  I think stippling would have been nice but it is a fairly large quilt and I wasn't sure how well I could manuever it, nor if I had enough Sulky thread on the spool I had bought years ago.  I stayed with stitch-in-the-ditch with a very few accents on the flowers.

The medallion corners got a feathered heart that isn't too exciting nor too visible.

I left some of the narrower borders unquilted just because they seemed to have enough pattern in them, but I put some narrow quilting in one triangle border.

On a couple matching narrow borders I added some curlieques but they don't really show up very well...

By the time I got to the outer border I was getting tired so I just whipped around the center squares and quilted petals in the corners.  This is my go-to quilting pattern.

I love the backing that I found for this quilt...  It was something very cheap in a local drygoods store!  Great find!  I added a label yesterday and though this quilt is destined for Leiya, I don't feel the postal system is reliable yet so for a month or two this will be up on my wall as I try to figure out how to get it to Indiana!

The quilt on my wall, reflected in the mirror.

And a full front view.  

A learning process

I hope you don't mind an art progress report today.  During the month of July I finished up one class of Sandy Allnock's on Travel Sketching and it was SO MUCH FUN!  I really would like to develop this technique more so that I can use it for scenery sketching and painting.  After that I started one of her Watercolor classes and this one is proving more challenging.  And of course I played around myself under the philosophy that doing ANYTHING with my pens or pencils or paint will be a very small step in the right direction of improvement.  It is an ongoing process...

So with the Travel Sketching class, which actually uses water soluable pens, I copied the class example and then I went out on my own and tried other mediums rather than the pens (as I have a limited number).  Watercolors, regular colored pencils, watercolor pencils.

The trouble with watercolor pens is that they blend (or not blend) depending on the color...  and of course my limited color palette made things very difficult...  The bullet journal version was from a trip with friends a few years ago and I used watercolor pencils.

Again, the limited palette made for a rather blue mountain scene but it worked out...  My Nikko scene was from a picture taken a few years ago across the street from me...  I think I used regular watercolors for this one.

Both of these worked out fairly well.  Watercolors for my bullet journal...  There were 5 lessons in this class (I think I showed the first two lessons last month) and I find it ironic that I was trying to do travel sketches when we don't do any traveling at all anymore...  But it was fun to try and take my own photos and turn them into paintings.

I am less than half way through the other class and I'm not very pleased with my results in that so I'll save you from seeing my odd attempts right now...  Maybe I'll pick out a few of the better ones (if there are any) next month.

On my own I've had a great time too with some fairly satisfactory results.  I showed a photo of Takumi that Julieta sent me last month, but I don't think I showed my rendition  of it in regular colored pencils and watercolors.

I tried a sketchy version of M-san's house too.

Another experiment I've tried twice now are 5 minute sketches of things around me. 

I give myself 5 minutes for these and then go back and add a bit of pen if it needs it.

And a last experiment yesterday morning was to take a sketchbook and with me on a walk with John and sketch a couple of scenes...  

The very pretty sketchbook was made by Jenni a few years ago.  She is a Quilt show friend in Australia, whom we met up with in Tokyo, and she makes paper and books and interesting art projects reflecting nature.  

With Jenni's book in hand, the challenge I gave myself was to sketch in very little time, maybe 5 minutes in each place, and not to use a pencil or eraser, so if there was a mistake then it had to stay...  After I came home I added colored pencil and watercolor and tried to stay loose.

The scenery.

The sketch.

And the painting.

The sketch of the tree turned out alright but I need to learn what went wrong in my green painting...

The scenery.

And the painting.  (I forgot to take a picture of the sketch.)

And that is how I'm keeping myself busy while Corona rages around us!

Hot days and cool mornings

As is much of the northern hemisphere, Japan is in the midst of sweltering heat.  Our activities are confined to morning and the afternoon hours are spent in front of the TV napping, organizing computer files or in my case sewing down binding.

Though having Mi on my quilt while I sew isn't helping, it is better than having her warm body on my lap as well as this quilt.

In this season, my hair looks much like Little Orphan Annie!

This week M-san finished quilting and putting the binding on her quilt!  Doesn't she do a beautiful job of hand quilting?!

This is M-san's largest quilt to date and she is so amazed and proud of herself that she could do it.  The pieced blocks are from my 2 1/2 inch squares bin and she bought the dark blue fabric to accent it.  M-san's favorite part of making a quilt is the hand quilting and she is a very fast quilter!  I think we started this quilt together in March but actually she had to put it aside for the month that I was in America.  She says she plans to hang this in her living room so that all her family can admire it.  She did a fantastic job!!!

July 22 was Tetsu's birthday and as it was the day that M-san usually comes over, we celebrated together with cake and presents like a new swim suit and socks.  Tetsu was so embarrassed.  He did not want to be sung to!  This year our blueberry bush is bursting with blueberries and I can no longer fit them all in the freezer!  We should have trimmed the bush to a more managable height because now Tetsu has to use a ladder to pick blueberries!

And today is Leiya's birthday though it was actually yesterday for us in Japan.  Happy Birthday Leiya!  July is a busy month for our family...  We have Julieta's coming up this week too!

And how about a couple of photos to make you feel cool...  Tetsu woke up for a bathroom trip and suddenly he was saying, "I've got to get a picture of this!  Wake up!"  The scenery outside our bedroom window was misty and the sky was turning pink from the sunrise behind us.  

In a few minutes the sky was lighter but the hills and forests were still covered in mist.  Cool?  Yes, it was!  Of course it was still 4:45 in the morning!

Machine quilting

It is HOT here in Japan!  And humid!  I really dislike this type of weather...  No use complaining about it though so on to a post.

Yesterday school got suddenly canceled... which wasn't a surprise.  Covid numbers have been increasing and last week 3rd graders and 6th graders had no school because someone in those classes had Covid.  After a three day weekend, I went to the crosswalk yesterday morning but the groups that came to school were very small.  I wasn't home an hour before the school called to say that more children in their classes were absent with Covid and so the principal declared that school was canceled and we would all be entering summer vacation three days early.  Well, I had found it hard to walk to the school in the heat anyway and already resorted to driving the short distance...  We will see how things fare at the end of August when school starts again.

So my mornings now will allow us a sleep-in though the cats and John don't recognize summer vacation.  We need to start our morning walk before the heat anyway so it is for the best.  

My schedule will go as... take a 20 minute walk at the cemetery.  Come home to granola and yogurt.  Do some iPhone things like study Spanish, Bible devotional, correct some English sentences from my few students, do a quick Instagram post.  Supposedly I'm ready then to do some household chores though these days not much gets done...  And then I retire to the sewing room while Tetsu heads to the garden.  Both of us have to beat the heat while we can.  The garden gets too sunny and hot and the sewing room has no air-conditioning so by afternoon I am out of there!

Today I prematurely put on some binding to my latest quilt, thinking that this evening I'll hand sew it down in the air-conditioned living room, and then I worked on the machine quilting.

I've gone for mostly Stitch-in-the-Ditch around the applique shapes though I did add some definition to the few flowers in the quilt.  From there it has been to figure out how to quilt the rest of this...  I decided against stippling.

In the outer border with triangles I went back to a motif that I'm comfortable with.

Then there was the question of whether the thinner borders needed anything or not...  I could leave it as is...

The interesting difference between hand quilting and machine quilting is that with hand quilting you pretty much have to mark your quilt before you begin and it is hard to add marking with all the fluffiness when the quilt is in the hoop (I guess that's true only if you use a pencil and not a marking pen and stencil).  With machine quilting, I can add more quilting whenever I get the feeling that one section has less quilting than other sections...  Thus I find it hard to decide when my quilting is really done...  I added some spirals in the narrow border and then went for it in the second border too.

I had planned to leave the corners alone but they looked lonesome and so I added petals or leaves or something....

I will sew up the binding tonight and then think about whether this needs more quilting or not...

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Appropo of nothing...  Does anyone use Bloglovin' to view blogs?  I'm about ready to give up on it because it rarely lets me log in and even when it does it often tells me the website is down.  I begin thinking that they've shut down the website completely but then I'll suddenly be able to use it again...  Still, it seems very unreliable and I wondered if there are any other alternatives..  I'm finding it difficult to go blog visiting...

  

Two weeks in July

Last week wasn't a great week any way you look at it...  I doubt I have any photos worth sharing...

It started on Thursday when I was vacuuming and managed to wrench my back AGAIN!!!  This is becoming an unfortuate habit!  I honestly wasn't doing anything strenuous and the only bright spot was that I already had an appointment that morning to see the acupuncturist for hip pain so I ended up there and said forget the hip, do something for my back!!!

I became philosophical as I got treaments over the next few days...  Do I really believe in acupuncture?  I have no idea.  The first time I had it I had done exactly the same thing to my back when I was at the preschool and the principal had directed me to the acupuncturist (also known as a bone setter) and said if I hurried I might get there before he closed for lunch.  I pulled into the parking lot just as the therapist was turning his closed sign on his door but he took pity on me and treated me during his lunch hour and when he asked me if I was adverse to doing acupuncture I said I'd be willing to try ANYTHING!!!  That was my baptism to needles and electric current treatment.  

It's hard to say if these things do any good...  You go home and get bedrest and within a couple of days things are on the mend again...  was it because of the acupuncture or would things have gone the same way just staying in bed?  This time around it worked the same way.  Treatment, put me in a back support and tell me to go home and rest.  Which I did for four days with Tetsu waiting on me hand and foot.  He is an excellent nurse.  But of course doing nothing makes me feel worthless on top of the pain and the atmosphere around me was gloomy...  But thank goodness my new Kindle was available for me to spend the many quiet hours!

No machine quilting going on as I don't want to push my quilt around for awhile.

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Then around noon on Friday, I come downstairs to turn on the TV and find out about the horrific news of the former Prime Minister Abe's assassination.  That has been unbelieveable and ever since, throughout the past week the news covers all points of the horrible occurrance.  You may remember that I wrote just a couple of months ago about Japan's strict gun laws and so it truly was an unthinkable possibility that anyone could be killed by a gunman in Japan.  By now we all know that it was a handmade gun but that indicates that now anyone in Japan can make a gun if they can get on the internet!!!  And because of the rarity of guns in Japan, it turns out that none of the Special Police protecting our politicians or whoever, are prepared to protect against gunfire!  Someone with a knife?  Yes, that is a possibility that the police have been trained for, but not a gun!  It is such a terrible calamity.

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The Covid numbers have increased alarmingly the past two weeks yet I think everyone has decided we will just have to live with it and the consequences...  There is still travel going on between prefectures and overseas.  Children who are out from school aren't tested unless high fevers are involved.  We still wear masks constantly but even I have gone back to the pool (no masks in the water of course) so it is a risky deal...

Any good news?  Well, Tetsu and I are celebrating our 42 anniversery today, maybe going out to dinner, maybe not as we will be taking some out of town guests to dinner anyway tomorrow.  

Every year I show these same two photos... I think our wedding photo albums are in the depths of the downstairs closet so sorry, I'm not going to go rooting them out today...

I guess you could say it started here.  This was our wedding invitation.

That's called ending a somber post on a high note.