A beautiful quilt and more sketching

The days are getting hot here in Nikko but we are still in the rainy season so most nights we get strong lightning and thunder storms along with a heavy rain.  Tetsu and I have to keep on top of closing all the windows in the house each afternoon to keep out the rain but then the heat becomes suffocating.  Once the rainy season is over we will just have heat and humidity and I dread that even more.  I am not a fan of Japanese summers!

Yesterday we met up with the Yamadas at our favorite Indian restaurant for lunch and got caught up. They were in New York for a month and so we've missed lunches and playing Canasta with them.  After lunch we went back to the Yamadas house for coffee and banana bread and we did get in a round or two of Canasta!  Basically Japanese are not much for board games or cards but thinking that Marlene, like me, may have enjoyed playing games with her family when she was a child, I approached the Yamadas about some game time.  We now make it a regular habit to play cards or Ticket to Ride (a great boardgame).  Tetsu goes along with it and enjoys it but I think Kohei-san is the biggest fan of all of us when in comes to playing games.  (And he won again yesterday.)

No our husbands are not having a confrontation!  Tetsu and Kohei were both involved with Judo in their high school and college days, and Kohei still works out with a community group.  Many years ago when all our children were little, Tetsu and Kohei led a similar community Judo club for young people and they both still talk Judo-talk which I don't much understand.  Kohei was explaining to us about a Judo throw that he'd done and the two of them decided that a demonstration was called for (but no, the throw did not end up with Tetsu across the room.  They stopped just before that.)

Marlene especially wanted to show me a quilt that her aunt had made for her and that she brought back from New York.  It is SO BEAUTIFUL!!!!  We spread it out on Marlene's bed and I admired it and explained the finer points of appreciating all the work that went into it.

Marlene is not a quilter (though she does appreciate the quilts I've made for her in the past) and so I pointed out differences in the pieced blocks and the way the hand quilting was placed.  

Each block had a feather wreath quilted over it which wasn't very obvious from the colorful side.

But from the back, the extent of the hand stitching was obvious.

The label was so pretty too!  What do you think?  Probably it was a cut out from an embroidered pillowcase or something.  What a great idea!

Marlene said her aunt is in her eighties and during Covid she decided to make a quilt for each of her family members.  The quilt is magnificent and Marlene and Kohei have a real heirloom now on their bed!  It was an inspiration for me to see this too and I'm wondering how many quilts I'll be making when I'm in my eighties!

But right now I'm just putzing away with a bit of sewing now and then but nothing spectacular.  

I've made sketching a daily habit though and some things are pretty good and some things best left in closed journal pages.  Joining Skillshare was one of the best decisions I've made recently and I love going from artist's class to artist's class trying and learning different things.  My most recent Skillshare teacher is James Richards.

First I learned how to sketch people quickly.

And then trees... 

Next was a class on cars.

And a class on lampposts and street signs.   And put that all together and we've got a street scene!

Now if I could just do this without any instruction...