Spring has sprung!

Yeah!  April is warming up!  We are so glad that we can start putting away fluffy pajamas, room heaters and knitted caps.  

Tetsu has changed the snow tires off our cars!  The daffodils are out!  

The forsythia are blooming!  I can hear nightingales in the mornings!  Pheasants are running across the lot behind us!  Yeah spring! 

 

I decided I needed to get a post written while I can because at the end of the week Julieta-san and her mother and brother are coming for a visit!  Tetsu is in full cleaning mode and he has a plan to wash one or two sets of curtains everyday until they arrive.  He is also out planting flowers near our front door to give the house a welcoming appeal.  We will have Julieta and family at our house for one day and then we are off to an onsen over night (they are only in Nikko for two days) but we've been excited and planning for their visit for months!  Hopefully I'll be able to write about their visit in the next post.

Actually, the cherry blossoms have already come and gone in our part of Japan, but as always the trees were beautiful though the blossoms fleeting.

My friends and I went out for a day of sketching and enjoyed riceballs and snacks while we played with watercolors and pens.

The elementary school had their entrance ceremony for the incoming 1st graders and the cherry blossoms were in full bloom that day.

This year there are only 10 first graders in the school.  Japan's population is shrinking!

Our daily morning walking at the cemetery where we were the only ones there to enjoy the bank of cherry trees.

And here you can see how the falling blossoms start looking like snow on the ground...  No, it really wasn't cold enough for me to need that down jacket, but it WAS 5:00 AM in the morning and I was too lazy to change out of my pajamas and I just wore the jacket over all...

After the cherry blossoms, the rape blossoms begin to take over the countryside.

On the quilting front, I finished the applique quilt I've been working on.  I'm not sure this was a success or not.  My purpose for making this quilt was to duplicate an old quilt I'd made 10 years ago with antique flour-sack fabrics (they were given to me nearly 40 years ago from an older woman who had had them passed on to her from her great aunt!).  Anyway I wanted to make a modern version from batiks and dyed fabrics that I have used and collected an abundance of scraps.  For that purpose this is really a nice showcase quilt, however instead of using the original pattern, I eyeballed the old quilt and just started in, realizing half way through that my squares were too small and my spacing too narrow.  This led to the overall quilt being smaller and though I had hoped to be able to display the two quilts side by side, they dont match up...  I had spent weeks making the tatting for the first quilt but with this one, I still had leftover tatting lace from Leiya's wedding veil from 5 years ago, so I put that to work for this quilt.  This is the modern batik version,

And this is the quilt from 10 years ago with antique fabrics.  M-san is also making a version of this quilt so stay tuned for her creation in the near future.

Luka got a drastic haircut!

Taiga is enjoying being barefoot!

And that's about it for the month...  Lots of end of the year meetings.  Lots of new school year meetings.  

Happy Easter!

Goings on in March

Let's see...  What has been happening in the last month?

Today is a warm day and the sun is out making it extremely pleasant.  But March is famous for its tempermental weather and we have had storms and snow and a lot of cold days.

We had two snow days when I had to report to the crosswalk for morning duty and Tetsu, ever afraid I won't be able to drive the snowy icy streets, drove me to the crosswalk and then stayed the hour to shovel and sweep the snow from the sidewalks.  It is sort of a futile past time because on snow days most of the children end up coming to school by car, but there were still a few who braved the slush and snow so it wasn't all in vain.  By afternoon most of the snow had melted.

After my last scrappy quilt, I got to work on a lovely art quilt from Marie Noah, called Misty Gorge.  Marlene's son, who had been living in Alaska, brought the kit for me and it turned out beautifully!   

It looks like this LONG quilt is a part of a series of different scenes from Alaska, some scenes with fish and deer etc.  

M-san and I enjoyed putting the parts together which were nicely laser cut and then I machine quilted it all.  I had such a time doing the machine quilting however and at one time concluded that my sewing machine was on the fritz!  The thread kept breaking, I'd adjust the tension (bobbin tension too!) and then the thread would get caught in the gears.  It's true that I often have issues using monofiliment thread, but that is the only way to do all the detailed quilting in art quilts, so I perservered.  I finished the quilting as well as I could and before taking the machine to the repair shop, I switched back to cotton thread and a different needle and low and behold, the machine is sewing normally again.  We'll see how long it works without an overhall.  Eventually I think I'll give this quilt to Marlene and maybe she'll want to pass it back to her son and his wife as they have good memories of their time in Alaska.

In Japan, the week of the spring equinox is a time to visit graves, clean them up a bit and leave flowers and drinks and snacks.  Tetsu and John and I still go walking in the cemetery every morning and as the sun is up early, it isn't as eerie as it has been in dead winter.  The cemetery near us has large family graves as is the tradition, but more and more people are worried about not having family to pass the grave to nor any family nearby who will visit reguarly and offer prayers.  In the cemetery near us there are medium sized graves that maybe only hold four or five urns at a time and they are lined up (on the left of this photo) like little "apartments".  And now, these communal graves are becoming very popular because they are just small square holes which will hold two or three urns and then are covered in lawn.  No gravestone nor any individual place to offer incense or flowers but there is a grid there on the left with each grave marked out with at least names.  It is sort of interesting how even cemetaries are changing in Japan.

Can you guess what this is?  No it's not a candle!  As we were walking around the cemetary, we noticed at the "apartment" graves, many of the little altars had these "candles" which were leaning this way and that.  We surmised that this is a bit of ice!  Probably what happened was that the snow from the day before had piled up on this altar and that little center area stayed frozen while the rest of the snow slowly melted leaving all these cores of ice!  

We had graduation ceremonies last week at the elementary school.  Japanese ceremonies are so ceremonial!  So much deep bowing, so much shouting out and marching to receive diplomas.  The principal even wore tails!  For all the formality, the 6th graders, the parents, the teachers and even the very formal principal all had their handkerchiefs out!

My friends and I did some sashiko from kits I bought.  None of the three of us had ever done sashiko before but it was fairly easy and as the stitch guide was marked, it didn't take much thinking about stitch length etc.

Another project that I've been doing is applique.  I actually started M-san on her own project with some antique fabric squares I had and then I decided to make a similar quilt using batik and dyed fabrics instead.  Many years ago I made this quilt pattern using the same antique fabrics that I've given M-san and I thought if I make the quilt again the batiks would be a nice companion quilt.

And look at the beautiful fabric selection that Leiya purchased yesterday!  She asked Tony to babysit while she went off for a couple of hours to JoAnn's before the store closes up.  Once at the store (and thoroughly enjoying her free day!) she facetimed me and I "walked around" the store with her while she chose fabric and asked my advice.  We have a plan for me to make Taiga a colorful robot quilt (pattern by Elizabeth Hartman) and Leiya just had a better fabric store from which to chose fabrics, let alone the fact that the prices are about half of what I pay in Japan.  Now the problem is how to get these fabrics to me!  Paying for shipping sort of negates the fantastic sales prices.  It may be a while before I start Taiga's quilt.

And here are the boys!  They seem to have a good time playing together!

All in all, Tetsu and I live quietly.  We get annoyed at our computers because we can't do something or even more frustrating, when we can't remember how to do something we used to be able to do!  We feel like such dinosaurs these days!

Back to my applique!

Handwork in California

Though I am not getting as much sewing in as I had hoped, I did bring some patterns from a kit my patchwork group had done a couple of years ago just so that I would have hand work at hand.  This is a quilt kit called A Kittens Tale, and I brought some scraps and four patterns with me this trip.

I seem to have forgotten a bit more embroidery at the bottom of the first block.  And this will also get some yo-yo flowers at the ends of those stems.

The second block is still a WIP and needs a lot more embroidery on it...

I got waylaid on the first two blocks because I remembered that I needed to make a fabric postcard for the month of July and as Grandma had been watching me make the other two blocks I made a similar kitten from left over fabric scraps from a box of years' past projects.

Up on Grandma's wall are the hanging post cards...  But wait!  The January postcard from this year is missing!  I pulled up the image on my computer to show Marcy but she says she doesn't remember seeing it so maybe it never arrived?  Is that possible?  It was the card of a stack of tea-cups...  It is very possible that it has gotten lost in Grandma's casita so I have moved some furniture and looked through the stack of post cards from years past but I haven't come across it yet.

Let's see...  February is the cupcake card...  March is the rabbit card.  April is the birds...  May is the stumpwork.  June is the flower and July is the cat...  Yep, that's only 6.  I'll keep looking.

I did come to the aid of Grandma's neighbor when she asked if I would look at an alb that she had offered to fix for her priest.  I went over and we determined that instead of replacing the lost snaps on it that I could put in Velcro for the fastener.  The alb is such an antique though that actually there were a lot of seams that needed to be resewn so I spent an afternoon repairing that.  So pretty!

So that has been what my hands have been up to this week.  I hope to get more done on the embroidery front today!

End of the year sewing projects.

I did get a bit of sewing in yesterday and finished up some half done projects.  Readied myself for something new.

The year is winding down and I had one last fabric post card to make for my mother.  When I started my fabric postcards I wondered if I'd even complete a year of it because my mother was already mostly bedridden.  Well, how many years now have I been making fabric postcards?  I think I started in 2014 so that means I've made 48 post cards these past four years.  I'll see if I can get a collage made of this year's but anyway, here is the December 2017 fabric postcard.

And this year, as I was making the patterns from a paper cutting book, I also made the paper sample too.  Here are all 12 paper cards I made this year.  (Not in order).

This month's card is a conglomeration of parts.  The hedgehog was one pattern but he was holding something else...  There was a small poinsettia flower in another pattern so I swiped it for my hedgehog, and then once he was on the card he seemed to be looking at something so I added a star.  Whew!  I got my cards done in time!!

I have also been tatting in the evenings.  It is just too cold to go upstairs and sew and it takes too long for the small space heater to get the sewing room warm so I've tended towards staying downstairs and wanting to keep my hands busy.  The tan necklace (can't tell that thread is tan, can you?) is made from antique crochet thread that had once belonged to my grandmother.  I still have quite a few spools of this thread and though I usually am tatting crosses, I got out my tatting book and made the necklace again.

I also had some finer white crochet thread so I made up another necklace with that for a friend.

And the project I'm starting is again because it is just too cold to stay upstairs sewing on the sewing machine so I've brought down scraps and am HAND PIECING a smallish piece for the table or the wall or whatever...  I haven't hand pieced in ages and I'd forgotten how fiddly it is to trace around the small diamond shape...  Good for cold evenings in front of the TV though!

History

Yesterday morning, my brother, Marcy and I went up to Idyllwild to the mountain cabin my brother owns.  The drive up is about an hour and a half.  Our stay there was a mere 45 minutes.  But even 45 minutes gave me lots of memories...

Getting to the cabin we have to drive through Moreno Valley.

My brother and I remember the drive as long and tiring but that must have been childhood perception.

I think I was around 11 when my parents bought this old cabin in the mountains.  Even back then the cabin was already heralded as being 80 years old and had been built in the days when people had drivers to drive them places.  The cabin consists of an acre of land very close to the town with a combination woodshed and tool shed and a "chauffeur" cabin for the original family's driver. 
The cabin was fully furnished when my parents bought it, filled with a sagging horsehair sofa, built in blanket chests and a huge stone fireplace.  The original cabin had only been one room but a kitchen had been built on, a bedroom, two bathrooms and a wrap-around porch that was later walled in.  There were beds and fold up beds and bookshelves filled with old books and ancient Reader's Digests.

The charm of the cabin for me was there was no TV, no radio and no telephone.  Charm or not, there was also no hot water nor refrigerator nor stove except for a hulking black wood burning stove in the corner of the kitchen.

In the town of Idyllwild there were/are churches and gift shops and a library and a doctor but no hospital.  There is an elementary school but no middle school nor high school so students have to be bussed down the mountain.  A fire station, a ranger station... a very expensive grocery store and a Rustic (really rustic!) movie theater.  In my childhood my brother and I looked forward to arriving in Idyllwild and glimpsing the theater poster board to find out what was showing that weekend.  The next night we would walk from the cabin to the theater for a movie viewing.  They were almost always child appropriate.

I loved the library.  I loved browsing the gift stores buying little ceramic knick-knacks of cats and squirrels and deer.  Generic gift store merchandise that seemed special in the mountain surroundings.  Children, and sometimes my mother, hiked up to Taquitz Peak a three or four hour hike, at first stopping at the ranger station for a hiking permit...  it made the hike seem adventurous and daunting thinking that the ranger needed to be aware if we got lost in the wilds.... Our goal was to get our Squirrel Cards when we reached the look-out tower.

For two or three years my brother and I went to the ISOMATA summer day camp learning about art and nature.  ISOMATA stands for Idyllwild School Of Music And The Arts and in those days was run by the University of Southern California.  We made God's Eyes and put on plays about tree elves, we modeled clay and made instruments of nuts and bowls.  A thoroughly delightful childhood experience!

Idyllwild was the one and only time I got a scolding from a policeman when we children were reported for throwing snowballs at passing cars from the Catholic Church steps.  I remember being terrified that I would be labeled a criminal for life when it had never occurred to me that I could be a danger to cars. 

There have been some changes to the cabin over the years.  Hauling ice to the ice box in the dark pantry became too much of a chore (though I appreciate the memories of those pioneer days) and there is an ancient refrigerator on the indoor porch now.  The wood burning stove is only a decoration now and the family uses a gas stove from the era of the ancient refrigerator. 

The new generation can't live without a TV and so last year my brother's old flat screen TV got hauled up to the cabin along with a trove of dusty videos and DVD's.  I inwardly seethed at the TV addition.  THAT doesn't belong in this cabin!!!  The fireplace looks old but in one of the Southern California earthquakes 15 or 20 years ago, original fireplace crumbled and the family had to find a craftsman who could do the stonework using the original stones.  The width of the fireplace is actually quite a bit smaller than the original.

My own grandfather, my mother's father, lived up in the cabin for a week or two alone one summer and he tried to at least paint over the stains in the ceiling board discovering that there was no ladder that reached the top most corners.  So the kitchen ceiling has remained half painted for nearly 50 years... New stains too I see, though my brother and friends re-tarred the roof about 10 years ago.

I think someone who appreciated antiques would be excited to look at all the old do-dads around the cabin... 

The two claw foot tubs that leak when in use...

The Indian basket over the doorway.  Actually I'm not sure if that is an antique or not... Maybe a gift-shop acquisition but I do recall old dusty baskets in the back of the closet... 

In my childhood I never thought twice about this mirror though nowadays I cringe at the antlers...  It was all part of the decor.

The deer head too makes me shudder and I dislike the display of... what... hunting? human superiority?  But I have to admit that the deer-head looks at home here and the long forgotten deer has watched over the cabin's owners for 120 some years.  Thank you deer.

The horse hair sofa has been replaced by another cast away sofa set...  the heater in the corner doesn't work as Takumi found out when he visited at Christmas.  The cabin has no insulation and my brother spent some time filling in woodpecker holes in the bedroom wall.  Now there are only a few spots where we can look straight outside through the wall!

And these are the curtains that Marcy wants replaced.  We counted 20 panels for the closed in porch, wrapping around two corners.  They are not long and are really only burlap...  They are probably the originals and are stained from water damage from a leaking roof and from woodpecker holes.  Good thing that this is desert country and that there is not much rain!

A lot of photos for 45 minutes, right?  I came home wishing I could just STAY in the cabin for a couple of weeks with brooms and rags and a hammer and nails and maybe some paint.  I'd sew up curtains and Indian looking quilts for the beds and get rid of the plastic tablecloth and TV!!!  I'd rake pine needles and set up a bird feeder and buy peanuts for the squirrels so that they'd visit daily.  I'd get a rustic outdoor lawn set so that I could read and drink coffee outside and I'd cook different types of soups and stews daily.  I'd walk the cool mornings and hike the mountain streams only a block away.  I guess I'd have to put in wi-fi though... I'm not a complete mountain girl.