Pin Burr quilt progress

 Hip hip hooray!!  I reached my sewing goal for this summer!

I have finished paper piecing 48 pieces of lattice!  That means 96 strips of triangles!

And I have finished hand piecing 30 lattice stars!

That means that when I return from the States I will be able to put the Pine Burr blocks and the lattice together into a flimsy!  All of these will now go into Ziplock bags along with the Pine Burr blocks and I am storing them on the top shelf of the sewing room closet.  TANYA!  Remember that!

YOUR PINE BURR QUILT PIECES ARE ON THE TOP SHELF OF THE SEWING ROOM CLOSET!!!

There!  Someone direct me to this post if I come back to Japan confused at the end of the summer.
 

Lotus park

Yesterday Tetsu and I took Choco for a walk at 4:30 am and then hopped in the car on another of Tetsu's outings.  He had heard about a lotus park and wanted to get there by 7:30!

We arrived at a full parking lot after a two hour drive and with camera in hand went looking for the famous lotus park.  Not hard to find!  Well, first of all there were all these people in the parking lot... and most of them were sporting heavy camera gear and numerous bags and tripods.

Would you look at these crowds!  At 7:30 am!

There were so many flowers blooming, in many different colors!  The park's pride and joy is this pond of Gyoda lotus plants which the city has cultivated from seeds found at an excavation site in 1971 and have been estimated to be from 1400 to 3000 years old.

Did you know that lotus flowers only bloom for four days?  The hard green lotus bud will push itself ablove the mass of leaves and daily grow larger, changing color to its final blossom stage.

The bud grows in size.

The first day the bud opens slightly and closes tightly after a couple of hours.  Here I found a threesome.  Well, not in the right order but in the middle is the brand new bud.  On the right is a first day bud.  And on the left is a lotus at full bloom.

 On the fourth day, the blossoms lose their petals one by one...

...until all that is left is the hard green pod (which was a soft yellow center to begin with) which continues to protect the growing seeds inside.

Kind of cute, in an alien sort of way.

And finally, towards the end of the year the pods dry and darken and drop their seeds into the pond again... I'm sure you have seen these interesting pod "flowers" in dry flower arrangements.  Well, they began as gorgeous blossoms!

And here are some flower pictures.  I followed "real" photographers around and stepped into their places after they were finished photographing...

You should have seen all us tourists lined up to catch this bee in the center of a lotus blossom!

"Oh, here's a bee!  Here's a bee!  Ooh.  May I step in and photograph it too?"

At 7:30 the light was cool and pale.

There was still some dew on the cool leaves floating on the pond.

But by 10:00, when Tetsu and I finally left, the temperature was rising as was the humidity!

You cannot imagine the different number of lotus species there are.  And I think the park has tried to raise all of them!

Tetsu laughed when he saw my collage.

"You do patchwork even in your photography!

Blueberries

It is 5:00am and we are ready to go off on a jaunt!  Just a couple pictures of our blueberry bush! 

What a joy to look out the window and see the berries dripping with dew!  Tetsu and I both enjoyed picking blueberries!

And eating them with our granola!  We've already eaten a couple of handfulls.  The rest will be frozen and we will add a few to our breakfast every morning.  And there are still berries slowly turning blue!  Looks like a good summer for blueberries!

Blog problems again

I'm afraid I'm a bit groggy this morning.  No sleep.

Well, I hate to be down and out and let people know it, but last night I lost all the blog pictures on my old blog.  6 years of pictures.  Now how did that happen?  I have no idea.  Maybe I messed something up.  Maybe Blogger which was giving me problems a couple of days ago had a tantrum.  Maybe I have a reason to be paranoid.

BUT!!!!!  At 4:00 am, after trying to understand Blogger's help column again, I e-mailed Takumi asking for help or advice or at least a reason to give up gracefully.  And within minutes Takumi was on the phone to me and working on my problem.  (It was the Fourth of July in the States and he was enjoying a day off.)  He spent nearly 30 minutes walking me through a retrieval process, and though he wasn't sure of the cause of the problem, he did fix everything.  Since 5:00 am until now, 9:00, I have been following his instructions about restoring each and every picture posted during the last 6 years.  And the old blog is back to its original form!

Now, I still don't know why it happened but I am grateful to my son (whom I consider to be a computer genius right at the moment) for solving my problem. An old blog isn't something that I had planned to visit very often but it contained our family's last 6 years of history and I was devastated to find it had disappeared.

Sorry.  I've had enough of pictures and files for the morning.  This will be a rare picture less post.  I think I'll go take a nap.

Turning Leaves quilt flimsy

Other things are taking priority over my own sewing recently.  I am not getting any more done on my Pine Burr quilt and I was really planning to have the parts finished before I went to the States!

Instead I've been putting the Turning Leaves quilt together into a flimsy!  All the blocks in this quilt were made by Mrs. Furui's hospital volunteer group members, whom I've never met.  Each volunteer made two applique leaves in corresponding colors and Mrs. Furui brought me the leaves to cut apart and sew back together making the dual image.

Once the leaves were made I randomly put them together in groups of four and then with a lot of greens and browns and batiks from my own stash, I got the border made.  I hope the border and the center are not too far off...

This quilt will go to Mrs. Furui tomorrow and she will hopefully be able to corral some friends into sandwiching it and basting it for her.  When I get back from the States at the end of August, the quilt will come back to me for machine quilting.  I am wondering again if I'm going to be able to machine quilt such a big quilt again!  It is always a challenge for me!

Actually I had made two example leaves that turned out to be smaller than the dimensions that we decided to use so I put those together into a mini-wall quilt.  The only disappointment that Mrs. Furui and I had with the large Turning Leaves quilt was that there doesn't seem to be any room for an appliqued animal or elf that we had been hoping to put on all our hospital quilts (to match their animal/elves wall silhouettes).  Maybe Mrs. Furui can applique something cute on the mini-wall quilt.

Yeah!  I am finished with my obligations on these quilts!  Mrs. Furui gets to think about them for the summer!  Now to get back to my Pine Burr lattice!

Wordless (almost) Wednesday

I am off again in a few minutes.  The kindergarten called and asked me to come early, so I am pushing it just getting on the computer...

Yesterday my friends had a birthday party for me!  They all came to English bearing cards and quiche and sandwiches and cake!  Even candles on the cake!

And all the birthday greetings from my blog friends too!

Tetsu's comment,

"Tanya, you really are lucky to have so many people thinking of you.  What a bunch of good friends you have."

Thank you so much!

Getting lost

I'm having some problems with Blogger this morning.  It won't let me post and I've spent a great amount of time using the help column.  I'm wondering if this is going to go through...

I'm afraid I'm getting paranoid.  I fear that the blog stalker that I had has found a way to attack me again.  If I disappear please seek me out again.  I'm probably lost in cyber space!  Hopefully my e-mail (g-mail) address will continue to work...

*********

Okay...  a lousy way to start a post I know... Do I have any good news?  Yes, depending on how you look at it... Yesterday I turned 58!  Tetsu bought me a new handbag that will carry my camera and wallet and all other pertinent items when I drag suitcases and computer case to the States this month.  And he also bought me a new camera strap. 

We were a bit late going out to dinner because of some mess-ups at Tetsu's office but I gather that he roared at his co-workers,

"Tonight is my wife's birthday and I HAVE to be outa here!  Tonight my wife is more important to me than this dang work you keep bringing me!"

Tetsu said he was very embarrassed to have to say that...   A very un-Japanesey thing to say... Work always comes first you know...  But how nice to know that he would vocalize like that.  There were many, many years when I felt I played second fiddle to Tetsu's work schedule.  Maybe that was the best birthday present of all!

Okay... now is this post going to upload?  Keeping my fingers crossed...