Rainy season in Japan

Ah-ah.  Time has passed by me again.  It has almost been a month since my last post...  There must be something going on around here to write about...

The biggest news was that Takumi celebrated his 40th birthday at the beginning of June.  I can remember my mother saying things like "How can my daughter be (such and such an age)?  I don't feel old enough to have a daughter that old!"  History repeats itself.

And here is the birthday boy (man).  Happy Birthday, Takumi!

The same week that Takumi celebrated his birthday, his elementary school friend stopped by with his family to bring us some strawberries.  Take-chan is a strawberry farmer and he often stops by with strawberries and then just spends an hour or so chatting with us.  Did you know that there are white strawberries now too?  We were the recipients of some huge red ones and sweet little ones and yummy white ones too!  Take-chan asked me to sketch a picture of his children holding the strawberries and I did my best!  

Then just last week Take-chan stopped in again with the last of this year's crop and we spent another hour or so chatting.  It is so nice that this young(ish) man doesn't mind spending time with us oldies!

M-san still comes faithfully for patchwork and recently drawing too.  She's another one who will spend time with me, a generation older, and doesn't seem to mind my ramblings...  Together the two of us paw through my scraps and come up with some project or another for her to work on.  She is making two of these farm scene quilts...

I got on the warpath for using up as many scraps as I can and I set M-san to work using 2 inch leaders and enders while I tackled the 2 1/2 inch bin.  I've got my quilt at the quilting stage but I'm a bit leery of starting because I have a feeling my backing and batting may shift if I push this around too much in my domestic machine.  But do I really want to hand quilt this?  Even if I quilt minimally?  In Japan's hot and humid summer?!  But because of that heat and humidity I'm not going to be able to spend much time in the sewing room so maybe hand quilting in the airconditioned livingroom is the way to go... This is now sitting in my sewing room marinating until I make up my mind.  M-san is doing something completely different with her 2 inch squares so that should be fun to follow also...

While making short work of square scraps I also grabbed a box of strings I've been collecting and started in on another toothbrush rug and even got two of my friends involved with making some rugs!  I am so pleased that this craft caught their interest and one friend is now teaching some of HER friends!  These are my friends' rugs...

And these are two of mine...  I think I've made four all together...  This is a great project for using up those strings that we quilters seem to accumulate, but I even cut up t-shirts and other knit fabric to use and it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.  My rugs are pretty hodge-podge and I just use what I pull out of the box, but you can see that my friends put more thought into the colors and number of rows etc.  

These two friends started out as English students but we've decided to give English STUDY a rest and just get together and chat, in English as much as possible.  Instead of getting out a book and studying, we come up with different art or craft projects every week.  Last month we did some weaving, and yesterday we did some bubble painting.

Here I am trying to blow bubbles onto a paper fan (but actually I was just getting colorful blobs...)  

We then switched to trying to make flowers and balls and I think we did pretty well!

We got together with the Yamadas at our favorite curry restaurant to celebrate Marlene's birthday.

Did you know that Japan is having a rice shortage?  This is huge news in Japan and while we can buy rice at an exorbitant price, we'd prefer not to...  Tetsu knows someone who knows a rice farmer and he kindly sold us 30 kilograms of rice for about a third of the price so now we are well stocked and hopefully the price of rice will go down before we need to buy any again!

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An update on Leiya's family...  Well, they DIDN'T go to Colorado.  Somehow that plan fell through but they were very philosophical about it as their Indiana house hadn't been put on the market yet, they hadn't signed a contract for the apartment they'd planned to rent, Tony's hospital was happy to take him back again.  It seems very complicated but I'm glad they are happy with where they are and the reasons why.  Luka is already registered for another year of preschool in their small Indiana town.

I don't think I showed this Victorian Puzzle that I made for Luka-kun last month.  It is a clever little puzzle, and I put a riddle and answer in it for Luka, as well as a maze...

The puzzle arrived (it took long enough!) and Luka seemed pleased to get mail from Grandma.

And that's about it from Japan.  We have rain and thunder and humidity and heat!  Not my favorite season!

Stay cool if you can!  (My friends in the Southern hemisphere, stay warm!)