Wishful thinking

I got a head start on the June fabric card for my mother.  These things are always pretty simple and this one went together quickly.  I think I'll title this card Wishful Thinking.  With all the rain we've been having our morning thoughts stretch towards whether it is sensible to do laundry that morning and if so, will the laundry dry before another rain shower. 

I've used this cute background fabric on baby quilts that I've given away, but I don't think it makes an appearance in any of my larger quilts.  The colorful sock illustrations makes me smile though the fabric doesn't really go with much else in my stash...  For a fabric postcard, the obvious design was more appliqued socks.

I know very few people with a clothes dryer.  The norm is to do laundry and hang it all out whether on the veranda or under the carport or out in the yard.  Our clothes "line" (pole) is on the second floor of the house and it gets some good sun but isn't really well protected in case of more rain.  But I've never wanted to have a clothes dryer...  Laundry gets hung out in the fresh air and everything smells wonderful at the end of the day.  Actually, come to think of it, I DO have a clothes dryer that was passed on to me by some friends when they returned to the States 25 years ago, but I may have used it 10 times.  Too costly to run.  Oh well.  It makes an excellent storage place for cat food.

This morning we awoke to blue skies and have sunshine for the first time in over a week.  Time to get some serious laundry done!  My washing machine is running at full steam right at the moment!  Got to get more socks out on the line.

A community crime

Hmmm...  Things are not always fine and dandy even in the back countryside of Japan.  Our little community has had an upstir this month resulting from a crime committed over 8 years ago.  In general, Japan is relatively safe though that has been changing in recent years.  I do go off alone (with Choco) early in the mornings when it is barely light with no fear for my safety and I will walk shadowed and lonely forest paths with nary a thought.  There were many many years when Japan was considered one of the safest countries in the world and the police force had a reputation for excellency but the reputation has changed too recently.  Gun laws are very strict... well, there are almost no guns at all, but there are other ways of committing crimes.

Eight and a half years ago a first grade girl was kidnapped on her way home from school and her body was found the next day in a neighboring prefecture.  The community panicked.  We were a country town, practically unknown of in Japan and suddenly we were thrown into the media spot light with TV cameras and helicopters and police combing the streets.  Parents and grandparents and neighbors volunteered to walk groups of children to and from schools in shifts.  Bulletins were posted and passed around discouraging anyone, child or adult, to be out alone at any time.  I curtailed my dog walking habits.  The kidnapper/murderer was expected to be captured within days... but the mystery of the child's death has drawn on eight long years.

I knew the exact area where the kidnapping had occurred.  Leiya had often walked the dark, lonely road after jr high hours a year or two before the kidnapping, I had used the road as a short cut on my way grocery shopping.  Over a few months the dreary atmosphere where the girl was taken, changed as the city cut down trees and thinned the forest, but even so, on the few times I'd use the road, I'd remember the still unsolved crime.

It wasn't like anyone wanted to or could forget.  The police made regular visits to each of the homes in the community.  They asked about our cars, our husbands and our sons.  They even pointed fingers at a few eccentrics in the neighborhood which I felt was overstepping.  Yes, the person was a bit strange but did that mean the police could twist my answers to their questions to mean I THOUGHT the person might be the kidnapper.  One man was taken away for a couple of weeks on a minor infraction, his home searched, his car confiscated... and then later he returned cleared and has tried to continue is small business.  But I'm sure just being under suspicion for those weeks has damaged his business and his heart.

As things dragged on, the first precautions, the walking to and from school with the children, began to crumble.  It was one thing for people to volunteer for a few days or weeks but after a few years there began to be bickering in the community.  Why didn't the PARENTS take responsibility for seeing to their children's safety.  It was too much to expect volunteer neighbors to go pick up kids from school every day and every day while the parents worked.  A school bus system was tried but people complained about the cost.  Buzzers were handed out (and are STILL given to every child in the community) but I have thought a buzzer that a child is supposed to set off if he/she has been accosted isn't going to do much good when there is no one around to hear the buzzer...  as is the case with the kids walking along the forests or past the rice fields.

And with the years everyone, including me, has fallen into thinking that the community is safe again and that the crime will probably never be solved.  In my case I was back walking lonely roads with Choco within months.

And then last week a suspect was arrested and has confessed to the crime...a person in the community.  And everyone wonders HOW he could so quietly slipped through the police's fingers for eight years.  And in hindsight there were so many signs that pointed to him.  There were foul ups in police work... but at least the police solved the crime even amidst years of criticism.

The little girl's grave rests in the cemetery across the road from my house.  It was beautifully built not long after her death... decorated with engraved circus animals and happy faces on the stone.  This week flowers are set in front of and along the path to the stone.  She would have been a first year student in high school.
 

Waiting out the rainy season

Japan has entered the rainy season and intermittently during the day (and night) we will get sudden showers.

A couple of days ago, Choco and I got caught out in the rain during our morning walk.

 We admired the droplet patterns in the rice field.

But ended up taking refuge under an Ojizou altar shelter.  Can you see how hard the rain was coming down?

 I had an umbrella but it wasn't doing Choco much good.

 All we could do was wait it out...  Good think we weren't in a rush!

Early morning farming

Choco is waking me up at 4:45.  What a crazy time to go out for a walk... but the farmers are out checking their fields around 5:00 and by the time Choco and I come home we end up greeting a lot of people.

The sun made it up just a bit before I did.

 After a rain, the clouds are so pretty.

A farmer going out to check his fields.

As was this man.  He is somewhat of a friend of mine and we chat when we meet along the road.  For reasons I don't know, farmer's fields will often not be connected and thus early in the mornings the farmers will drive their pick-up trucks or in this case their motorcycles, to their numerous fields that they have spread out over the countryside.  I am often surprised to find a farmer friend whom I know lives at a certain house, out checking his fields way on the other side of the area.  Of course the farmers are surprised to see Choco and me so far out on our walks too.

Mr. Y is a friend who went into farming after his retirement from another job.  Tetsu dreams of doing that some day.  These days Mr. Y rents a field behind us and produces some 30 types of vegetables throughout the year.  And I often benefit from his abundance.  On this day, he presented me with a bunch of freshly picked radishes.

Just beautiful!

And another day Mr. Y had me bring over a couple of planters and he planted lettuce and tomato plants for me (and carried the heavy planters back to my house for me.)  So now I am a "farmer" myself.  Five plants that so far haven't caused me any work at all.  I think that's cheating!

Quilting the Reflections quilt

In my quiet days last week, I went back and forth from the sewing room to my quilting chair in the living room.  I made more progress up in the sewing room machine quilting the Reflections flimsy that I've had up on my design board.  This isn't finished yet (but the end is in sight!) but here are a few pictures of the work in progress.

I started off with the swirls in the small squares and went back and forth along the squares quilting in spirals.  I wanted to take some of the blockiness out of the quilt with some gentle swirls (that was the plan...  I seemed to have veered from the plan in my later considerations.)

Taking a step back from the quilt, I could no longer see the the light and dark shading on the different halves of the blocks and there HAD been a nice secondary design of light and dark larger squares before.  As quilting shows up better in the lighter areas I went back and quilted lines between the smaller squares (which was a bit more difficult than it looks....  back and forth with a free motion foot and using a broken ruler as a guideline...)

And today I am quilting in more spirals in the border.  I'm not really very happy with this.  I had thought that spirals in the border would tie everything together but I don't like my spirals...  After one border I considered taking it all out and starting with something else but that seemed like a lot of wasted thread and wasted effort.  This is passable.  I probably won't do spirals in a wide border again though.

And here is my work space...  I have a quilting halo that I purchased one year at a quilt show for small work but I've never gotten good at using it.  I tried it for a few spirals but got stuck.  The halo is just resting there looking in the way because I can't get it off my space unless I take off my quilting foot and that was too much of a bother too...  Notice my small, not very technical Brother sewing machine there.  Just the basics!  But my quilting table that Tetsu made for me is a life saver!
Give me another few hours on this and it will be done!

Thingamabob brooches

So...  I did try a new craft.  And I'm afraid I probably am not going to do be doing it too often.  But it was a new thing to learn and I will tuck it away in my head for future reference.

A couple of months ago I was at a charity concert where some lovely little brooches were being sold.  For a measly amount of 200 yen!  So I peered into the basket... baskets and tried to choose one!  There were so many colors and types of fabrics used that I practically missed the start of the concert for all my looking.  Well, I couldn't choose just one and I ended up with... I think 8.  After I came out of the concert I was back at the broach table and looking at the left-overs.  One of the ladies selling the brooches approached me and told me that their volunteer group had made all the brooches out of handkerchiefs!  Men's handkerchiefs, women's handkerchiefs, sheer fabrics, and heavy woven fabrics... but all handkerchiefs!  I think I bought two more while chatting about how they were made.

I brought the brooches back to my friends in my patchwork group and let them each choose one and everyone had a good time again and marveled at how they were made...  We could tell that they were fashioned after the Japanese fabric handcraft for making hair ornaments called Kanzashi, but that was as far as our knowledge went.  Some of us checked out the Internet, some of us visited the library for instructions on how to make Kanzashi ornaments but though the basics were there, the question was how to make the parts into a brooch.

In the end I contacted the concert producer and asked if someone in the volunteer group would be willing to share the pattern with me.  And later the lady in charge called and offered to teach me!  That was why I tried the new craft.  Mrs. S came to my house last Saturday bringing handkerchiefs and cardboard templates and glue.  Yes... glue...  My downfall...

I chose a handkerchief from Mrs. S's stack...  And she had me mark lines about an inch square...  Now, on this day, I followed Mrs. S's instructions implicitly but if I were doing this again... I'd just get out the roller cutter and cut strips and then squares... A few quilting shortcuts might come in handy!

The next step was to cut up the handkerchief.  First of all, not pictured, was to cut off the sewn selvages of the handkerchief... Those four edges are important later.  Then I cut up squares and took out about 35 to 40 of the color I wanted to use.  I really regretted choosing the black handkerchief.  I should have known that the black makes everything harder to see...  By the way, one handkerchief can make 4 or 5 brooches...

So I had my 30 some inch squares and one larger square that would be used to cover the cardboard backing later.

Then came the hard part.  Fold the little square into a triangle.  Fold each of the base triangle corners in to the center and glue down with a toothpick.  IMPOSSIBLE!!!  As you might imagine I got more glue onto all my 10 fingers than on the square and the little thingamabob still wouldn't stay closed!  You cannot imagine how I pushed and prodded and squeezed and peeled at 30 some thingamabobs!  SOME of them stayed the way I wanted them too.

 In the meantime Mrs. S was fiddling with a few of the pieces making comments like,

"I have made over 1000 brooches for the volunteer group.  It is my own pattern and I make all the parts while I'm watching TV in the evenings.  The other ladies don't much like making the brooches anymore but I can't understand why...  They are SO easy!"

(I, on the other-hand understood completely while the volunteers weren't so thrilled about making brooches.)

While waiting for the glue to dry Mrs. S showed me how she glued the base fabric to a cardboard circle, added a safety pin and then topped that all off with another circled that had been coned a bit.  More liberal applications of glue to hold both pieces together with the overlapping base fabric.

Those little glued thingamabobs still needed more glue to hold back their remaining corners and more time was spent letting them dry while Mrs. S and I drank tea and ate cookies.  I found out all sorts of things about Mrs. S during our tea time.  She is an energetic 73 year old who volunteers and counsels and helps at the City Hall social services offices.

Okay...  Finally I was finally ready to glue down the thingamabobs on the funny coned shaped base that we'd made.  I was starting to not like glue very much.   And here was where the selvages came in.

"Just slaver that glue all over one of the selvages that you cut off and roll it all up to the size you like!"

More glue!

My finished brooch.  Actually two...  The one in the forefront is the one I made with Mrs. S peering over my shoulder.  Three hours of work.  The one in the background is one I made after Mrs. S left and I could try to make my thingamabobs with thread by sewing the corners back.  I do much better work with a needle and thread than I do with glue.

But I'll never do as nice a job as Mrs. S.  This is one of HER masterpieces...

As Mrs. S packed up and was leaving she looked at some of the quilts that I have on the wall and by my quilting chair.

"I could never do all that fiddly work.  It would drive me crazy!"

My thoughts exactly.

Starfish

I'm back.  Thank you for your encouraging words. 

Many years ago I read an uplifting fable about a man walking along the seashore after a storm.  The beach was littered by thousands of starfish that had been flung onto the sand in the tempest and as the man walked he would every so often read down, pick up a starfish and then fling it back into the ocean.

A fellow beach walker watched the first man tossing the starfish back into the sea.

"Look at all the thousands of starfish lying here.  Your measly efforts to save them are wasted.  You are just one man and the doomed starfish are far too many in number for you to make any difference."

To which the first man picked up another starfish, tossed it into the waves and said,

"Made a difference to THAT one."

***

I don't know if the fable has done me favor, as I always see lost animals and think,

"If I chose to, I could make a difference to that one."

But I get overwhelmed.  I know that the moral of the fable is not to beat yourself down because you are not out there saving the world daily...  The moral is for people to do what they can when they can and to realize that each separate effort adds up in invisible ways.  It is a sign of courage to continue making the effort when it seems pointless.  My problem is not being able to forgive myself for not being able to do more.  My animal devotion is such a small thing when there are humans in the world trying to eke out lives and survive.  But God made me as I am...  an animal lover.

So...  What have I been doing?  Well, for one I deleted unanswered mail from my inbox.  I will start afresh there too.  I have been walking Choco a lot on new and different roads.  I have been quilting, both machine and hand.  I have tried out a new craft that I will share tomorrow.  Not too much photography going on...

Here is Velvet taking a nap in my JoAnn's shopping bag.  My sweet Vel who is one of the "starfish" I saved 16 years ago.