August life

August is winding down and hopefully the summer is too.  It has been just too hot and humid for too long and I'm hoping some cooler weather will spark some new motivation in me.

The second week of August was marked by Obon which is a week where spirits are supposed to return to the family grave and families will welcome them at the beginning of the week with the scrubbing of the gravestones and with offerings of food and flowers.  Family members will gather for meals and visiting and praying at the familiy altars and after the local Buddhist priest visits and offers prayers, the spirit will be returned to the cemetery.  The usually deserted cemetery (at 6:00 AM when we go walking) had a traffic jam in the parking lot with extra staff directing traffic the first and last days of Obon.

On one of the relatively cooler days of Obon, Tetsu and I took advantage of our overgrown garden to have breakfast outdoors.  We have always enjoyed our weekend garden breakfasts but sadly these open-air mornings will be coming to an end as construction will begin on putting a road behind us and the destruction of Tetsu's garden will have to be done next month.  We've been expecting this change for months and that is why the garden became overgrown as Tetsu didn't see the point of keeping it up when we knew it was going to be torn down...

All this disappears in a few weeks...  

So sometime soon, a temporary protection fence will be put up along where the road is supposed to go and completion date for road and factory is sometime in the future two years from now...  We are trying to be philosophical about the changes... Who knows what wonderful thing will result in the river of life?

While we were eating breakfast, we enjoyed watching the little white flowers (that were behind me in the previous photo) wave and dance in the breeze.  Tetsu would love to move some of these plants that we've enjoyed to somewhere new but we actually own so little land that there probably isn't going to be much salvaged...

I made another little McKenna quilt to gift to a friend who helped me out by bringing back from America a lot of fabric that Leiya had purchased and sent to her parents home.  My friend was going back to the States for the summer and she offered to bring a package if Leiya could get it to her.

And look at this haul from Leiya!  When JoAnn's was going out of business she made a special trip to find fabrics for my next quilt that I'm planning to make for Taiga.  As soon as it gets cool enough upstairs I'm going to close myself up in my sewing room for a few weeks and get to work on a new quilt!  I'm so looking forward to it!

M-san finished the quilt that she was making from my 2 inch squares bin that was overflowing.  I think she had fun when making the flimsy but when she got to the machine quilting she messaged me quite upset that things were not going well for her.  The backing was wrinkling, she didn't like how the big quilting was turning out... she was getting very frustrated.  When she brought the quilt over I advised her to add more stitching to her big quilting and to not worry about the backing (she'd done so much that she did't want to rip it all out and start again) and to consider it a learning experience.  Next time maybe we'll tape the backing to the floor before trying to baste it, and we'll probably be more generous in our application of basting spray.

Really, the patchwork backing hides a lot of the wrinkles.

I had been working with 2 1/2 inch squares and did something completely different from M-san's!

So, the summer was going along normally with me nagging Tetsu not to do too much weed-whacking and outdoor work (he claimed washing the front porch in the heat was a cooling activity) and me going from painting to sewing binding, to tatting to both of us going to the pool.  AND THEN ON SATURDAY NIGHT....

...I managed to slice open my thumb with a vegetable slicer when making dinner!  I spent half an hour holding my thumb and pacing hoping to stop the dripping blood but alas, Tetsu had to take me to the emergency room to have three stitches put in.  That put a damper on painting, sewing, tatting, and swimming, not to mention cooking and washing up.

Tetsu has banned vegetable slicer use in our house.

Actually, I've discovered I can still draw and write if I hold my pen in an awkward way...  I thought I'd figured out how to tat with my bandaged thumb but became frustrated because there was no way for me to fix tatting mistakes without thumb use... Going to the pool or onsen has been forbidden for the next two weeks by doctor's orders.  I haven't even attempted sewing... and today's blogging is going slowly as my touch typing results in me hitting "N" instead of the "space bar" on my computer...  Tetsu is doing all the washing up and we've been eating out more than usual...

Staying positive!

Here's hoping that cool weather is just around the corner!

Hot days of summer

Summer business has settled down and now we are left with heat and humidity and a lot of free time.  It is nice to be able to sleep in (no crosswalk guard duty) but it gets too hot to go outside for more than a potty run with John.  Tetsu spends most of the day napping and listening to baseball on his cellphone.

Going to the pool has been the most regular part of our summer routine but even that has changed a bit because though the outdoor pool opened (I love floating around watching the clouds) there are so many children and families that it is nearly impossible to do any swimming.  In the afternoon we are often met with thunderstorms and then the lifeguards all frantically signal for everyone to get out of the outdoor pool and head for safety in the overcrowded indoor pool.

The last week of July our old cat Cleo, suddenly took a crash-dive regarding health and we were in waiting mode for the end to come.  Trust me, you don't want to hear all the details but watching him during this time was terrible...  Japanese vets in general don't believe in putting pets to sleep and Tetsu doesn't really want to consider it either.  After all the animals that we've loved and seen through to the end, I've gotten used to the idea but I am sure if we were in the States the vet would have recommended euthanasia for Cleo.  Surprisingly though, he has come back around and is rather enjoying himself again, eating well, jumping up onto the bed or the windowsill...  He's not ready to give up yet and I've just been happy to have had these extra three weeks with him...

Cleo the black striped kitty is 21.  Toi, the orange one is 17.

While we were keeping watch over Cleo, we were also staying close to the TV as on July 29th there was the large earthquake in Russia which kept the world watching for tsunami.  All of the coast of Japan was on alert the whole day which meant people were on rooftops and in the hills for hours during the horrendous heat wave we were having.  The prefecture we live in doesn't have a coast so basically we weren't affected though Shinkansen and other modes of travel came to a halt for most of the day.  I used the time in front of the TV to do some hand quilting and I finished off my current quilt.

My goal with M-san was to use up some of the leaders-enders squares that I had and she took home the bin of 2 in squares while I pulled from my 2 1/2 inch square bin.  I decided that I probably wasn't going to be up in the sewingroom during the hot summer so I chose to hand quilt this even though it is pretty large.  It was very pleasant to sit in the air condintioned room and work on this for the first days of summer!

Yeah!  Another finish!

Another sewing project that has been in the works for MONTHS has been the renovation of a kimono into a coat.  Let me tell you, this is probably an endeavor I'll never do again... especially the way I went about it.  Probably back in winter I noticed that a lady in the English class that I help with, always wore a shirt or coat made of kimono.  I have so many kimono's passed on to me by my mother-in-law or through friends whose parents have passed on.  I asked the student if she could give me advice on making something out of a kimono and she said she would be happy to make me something.  I appreciated her offer but really wanted to do it myself and so she said she would think about it and find a pattern that would nice.  

A month later (I only help with the class once a month) my student had a pattern ready and an idea in mind for a reversible coat.  I had brought three or four dark kimonos and she evaluated their quality and choose a brown one.  She pulled from her own stash of kimonos, the yellow one and then told me how to mark and baste a pattern.  Hey, I can do to this...  I've sewn quite a bit (not clothing though).  Well, basting clothing (or kimono, I'm not sure which) in Japan is completely different from how I learned to baste (did I learn to baste?).  You use TWO strands of basting thread and very short stitches and then gently pull two layers of basted fabric APART, and CLIP the threads leaving snippits on both pieces of fabric.  Of course this had to be done on both the brown and the yellow pieces...

I don't know how many times I did a step, sent my student a photo and she'd text back, "No, that isn't right.  You'll have to do it again."  Things like I didn't baste my corners exactly or my basting wasn't exactly on the line.  Same with when we got to sewing on the sewing machine.  I'd do the homework, bring it to class the next time and she would say it wasn't exact enough and to take it out and do it again. I really can't complain because my student (now she was my teacher) was always right...  I was never exact enough and things had to be moved a milimeter or so...  I blame it on my laize faire attitude to quilting.  "So it's wonky.  It doesn't matter.  No one will notice."  This was NOT my kimono teacher's philosophy!  It got so that I began to dread working on my kimono coat... And Tetsu wasn't helpful by pointing out that he couldn't imagine me ever wearing a kimono coat (bright yellow at that!).

The reversible coat.  Brown-side out...

Yellow-side out.  I've sent these last photos to my student/teacher and she says I still need to tack the shoulders and collar and maybe take out the hem and do it again...  but as I say, it is too hot to be in the sewing room right now so I'm taking a break.  Someday I'll model this for you...

I've been taking a sketchbook design class with Shari Blaukopf and she gave us the challenge (after showing examples and sharing ideas) of designing a page of things meaningful to us and so I pulled many of the tools of making a quilt and spent a day drawing and painting this.  I'm so happy with it!  And now my latest quilt is preserved on paper!

And that's about it for the past couple of hot weeks!