Border quilting

I'm on my last lap of quilting the Scrappy Majestic Mountains quilt for my nephew Colin.  The white areas are finished.  I've been working on the borders and it is a LONG way around.  Twice.

 I roughly drew in the undulating spine in the feathers.  And I quilted the inside of the feathers all the way around the quilt.  I feel pretty confident about sewing this type of feather.  I just zoom up and around wherever I like changing shapes and swirls at whim.  No rhyme nor reason.

And when I say zoom, I really zoom!  I take these at full speed on the sewing machine only slowing when I get back to the spine and not even then sometimes.  Unless I go very fast my stitches tend to get too large.  They are still probably too large but I can't get my hands to go any faster and if I let up on my foot pedal the swirls get jaggedy rather than flowing.  Thus speed counts for me!

That is until...

I just "happened" to check the underside of my border (which I don't do very often).  This was all basted down so I didn't think I needed to worry about the backing turning under but I had another think coming...

GASP!  And RATS!!

I've sewn a whole foot of the border with the backing turned under.  I guess I'm a little too confident.

I spent a good 30 minutes ripping all the stitches out on the one side of the underturned border.  The ripping has delayed the completion of this quilt.  Maybe I can get it done tomorrow.

Garden or Gardening

I spent a very enjoyable day with paper, pencil, fabric scraps and embroidery thread.  I have finished the Tokyo International Quilt Festival Partnership Quilt block!

GARDEN

Or in this case GARDENING.

After looking around the Internet for gardening ideas I sketched a rough draft on paper.  And then I gathered my materials and started sewing in stitches.  As Julie says, a 6 inch square is not very big and I couldn't get some of my original ideas onto fabric.  Lots of the flowers had to go and I couldn't figure out how to add depth to this very little canvas.  And definitely give up on pointy grass!

I also had some trouble with those gardening gloves (they are always white in Japan) and finally raw edged them and sewed them down with small stitches.  They may or may not hold...  with washing they may fray away.  But that's what happens to our gardening gloves around here anyway.

Anyway my small contribution has been made.  I sure hope this will be accepted by the Partnership Quilt committee (last year my first block wasn't).

That was a lot more fun and satisfying than the gardening that awaits me outside.  Cost less to make too!

Rice planting

Good morning.

The weather has turned nice and because of the holidays Choco and I go out for long walks.  The farmers are getting ready for planting their rice fields and some of the flooded fields already have a fuzz of little rice seedlings covering them.

This farmer waved to me as I photographed him getting his field ready.  The flooded soil has to be turned and then settled again before rice seedlings can be planted and that was what this farmer was doing this day.  He will be coming back later with a different tractor to plant rice seedlings.

I spied on this family from my perch in the forest.  Their father or brother or someone was driving the tractor planting the rice and the family was there on the bank ready to reload the tractor with flats of rice and probably offering drinks of cold tea when the tractor driver was ready for another load.  In the meantime it looked like everyone was enjoying a picnic.

Here is the farmer planting his rows of rice.

When I ask my local friends what they are doing this Golden Week or when I inquire of holiday plans to the elementary school students, many of them answer.

"We're going to help plant rice."

Aunts and uncles and cousins will all gather at the main house and three or four days of planting will begin.  The women folks might make up a feast for in the evenings and for the picnic lunches, the children will help carry flats of rice seedlings to the tractor so that the vehicle doesn't have to make the trek back to the truck.  Towards the end the farmers (and children) will go along the outer reaches of the rice field and plop seedlings into the mud by hand.  And of course children will be catching pollywogs and bugs and having a grand ol' time "working" in the fields.

I love the glass like surface of the rice fields before they get planted.  This is the same field as that farmer's in the red tractor taken the day before.  It will probably get planted today.  This isn't a fish-eye lens shot.  I just happened to be standing at the corner of the field.

The time between the flooding of the fields and the planting is only a matter of days and this scenery will change quickly.  The reflected clouds scudding across the sky can only be seen on clear, windless days (the wind creates ripples in the "mirror".)

 A shot from Tetsu's camera.

Here is this morning's picture of the field from a few days ago in front of the elementary school.  Before I got a picture of the clear mirror it has already been planted.  As you can see, the field isn't flooded very deep.  A lone crow was taking a stroll through the water.

This photo is just to show you how I'm using my iPhone these days.  I have put a pedometer on it and also have started downloading audio books which make the longer walks with Choco pass quickly and pleasantly.  A good book to listen to, beautiful scenery and a happy dog makes for lots of steps at the end of the day.

Gardening

Today is Boys' Day.  My living room calendar has a cute picture on it this month.

Yesterday my neighbor, Mrs. Yano, called me just as I was sitting down to start sewing.

"What are you doing?  Do you want to go buy some flowers?"

Mrs. Yano's joy is gardening.  She and her husband have vegetable fields and in autumn they become chrysanthemum fields and Mrs. Yano supplies chrysanthemums to local markets.  Mrs. Yano LIVES for the spring season and though she already has colorful flowers decorating her entryway, she is always willing to go buy more.

So off we went in her car and we visited a very large nursery with loads of flowers to pick and choose from.

HOWEVER...

I'm not much of a gardener.  I look at all the flowers and think,

"How can I ever decide what to buy?  I don't know what is seasonal or perennial. I don't know what likes shade and what likes sun.  I don't know what wants to be planted in the ground and what likes pots."

Mrs. Yano says,

"Just buy what you like!"

But actually I liked the ready made pots of multi flowers.  The expensive ones that someone had artistically arranged.  Mrs. Yano pooh-poohed those.

"The fun is in imagining, choosing, making them grow!"

So I bought flowers...  (surreptitiously looking at the ready made pots).   And I sighed when I bought them and Mrs. Yano looked annoyed.

"Why are you looking all sad?  Flowers are supposed to make you happy!  I can't think of anything that excites me more.  You look like something terrible is going to happen."

"I have no idea how to plant these...  And within weeks they will probably die....  I'm not very good with flowers.  I feel sorry for these poor plants coming to live at my house."

Mrs. Yano promised to help me and when we got home we dumped out the dead soggy planters that I'd once used and filled them with fresh dirt from Mrs. Yano's field and soil mixture bags.  Mrs. Yano has a variety of different soil mixtures that she has researched and purchase from somewhere...

I stood there with my gloves on (I wanted to make a show that I was actually willing to participate in this planting experience) and watched as Mrs. Yano expertly divided plants into the three different planters I'd brought over.  She instructed me on how to untangle roots as I planted but quickly pushed me aside as I was either too vigorously untangling or not untangling enough.  She thought of color and height and added a bit of fertilizer as she went along.  She decided I hadn't bought enough color variation and donated one of the new plants from her own nursery bag.  And while she was at it, she dug up flowers and greenery from her own yard saying that the foliage might be green now but eventually there would be a pretty pink flower or a yellow one or whatever.  (They all look like weeds to me.)

I transported my flower planters back to my house and they do look very lovely.  Mrs. Yano came over in the evening to check and see if I'd watered them properly (I hadn't. They needed more water and not on the leaves please.)

Mrs. Yano is not the only one who is surprised at my ineptness about gardening.  Tetsu often comments that for someone who likes nature so much I sure don't take much interest in gardening.  It isn't the dirt that I don't like...  It's the fact that there are no instruction books or patterns to go with these flowers when I buy them.  I think I need to take a class...

In my defense I'd like to say that if I took Mrs. Yano to a fabric store and told her to pick out fabrics and told her to go make a quilt, that she would probably not show the same enthusiasm as she does for her flowers.  I choose my colors and fabric patterns, I have an idea about what I want the final product to look like and I enjoy watching my quilts grow.  Sort of like growing a garden I guess...

By the way, my blog friend Jenni reminded me that the Tokyo International Quilt Festival's deadline is coming up for participating in next year's Partnership Quilt project.  It certainly isn't very well advertised because I've spent some time looking around the Internet for the official announcement (in either Japanese and English!) and can find nothing.  I guess I'm not looking in the right places...

ANYWAY I pulled up an old photo that I took when I was at the festival this January and it says...
Next time's theme will be GARDEN

The block requirements have CHANGED from 20 centimeters to 15 centimeters in size (that's about 6 inches folks) and the deadline is July 31 a month earlier than previous years.

And in small print they are saying that the official announcement will be in June which seems a bit late to me...

So....  I wonder if gardening with fabric will be any easier than gardening in the dirt for me.

Green and rainy

It is a rainy, stormy day in Nikko and I guess I will retreat to the sewing room and work on Colin's quilt today.

I spent one or two days stitching in the ditch around all the "mountain" points and then started in yesterday sewing in feathers.

I had wondered if I was getting TOO much green into this quilt what with the use of variegated green thread for the feathers but actually the green is very light and they don't show up much more than just shadows.  Green is the theme!

It takes me about an hour to go down the whole white strip and make feathers on one side and then the other.  Actually I didn't really time it but it SEEMED like a long hour.

There is quite a lot of pushing and pulling of the quilt when I get to the mid-point and need to turn the quilt around to work on the opposite side (the sewing machine throat isn't very large).  By the end of the hour I need to take a break because my neck muscles stiffen up.  This doesn't have a deadline so there's no reason to push myself but I do have other projects that want their turn on the sewing machine too.

Other news is that Marcy and I are keeping in touch via the iPhone these days and she has sent me instant photos of Grandma who was trying to eat her big lunch.  I doubt she had more than a few bites of this.  She looks warm and happy though and Marcy still sings the glories of the Hospice bath nurse.

And here are some left over photos from Tetsu and my day out last Sunday...

After hunting for the flying carp.  We ended up at a little cafe not far from us where he and I enjoyed some shaved ice.

 Which is bigger?  Tetsu's tummy or the shaved ice?

 The shaved ice was a pretty big serving!

 The scenery was peaceful... and green.

But wait!  I'm being attacked by a giant Praying Mantis!  Ah well, that is what all this rain will do!

Reimen

This is not really a cooking post... just a post about what we had for dinner last night.

One of Tetsu's favorite meals is Reimen.  That is not Ramen.  Ramen are Chinese noodles in hot broth with vegetables or pork or whatever on top.  Reimen is a Korean dish.  Again, noodles (the "men" in the words mean noodles) but this one is served cold.

For some reason, Reimen became a specialty in Morioka in northern Iwate prefecture, where Tetsu lived for most of his life and where I lived when I first met Tetsu.  We always liked Reimen when we lived there and the dish has become famous enough that some supermarkets even in our town of Nikko will sell Reimen noodles during the summer.  Thus I found the Reimen packet at the supermarket yesterday and cooked them up for dinner.

Reimen noodles are chewy, gummy things...  I have no idea what they are made of.  They are unlike egg noodles or glass noodles or buckwheat noodles or any of the other noodles that Japanese love so much.  They boil up quickly... like in two minutes, and as I say, they are served cold so they are rinsed in running water before serving them up with an ice cold spicy soup.

The soup comes as part of the package and is somewhat sweet, somewhat spicy.  Definitely a Korean taste.  And whatever else is served as toppings can be made up as the chef likes though traditionally the toppings will be a hard boiled egg, cucumbers and kimchee... the spicy smelly cabbage pickles that are part of Korean's daily fare.

Last night I topped our Reimen with ham, cucumbers, canned mandarin oranges, yaki-niku (barbecued pork), boiled greens (from our farmer friends), a hard boiled egg and kimchee.

That is quite a lot of food but basically healthy I think.  Couldn't see the noodles through all the toppings!

And for dessert we had a cup of tea and a mini sponge cake...  I just HAD to buy these cakes that I found at a bakery the other day!  A paw cake!

I've got to do some walking today to work off last night's dinner!

Carp hunting

Though the week is a holiday in Japan, Tetsu is working full time and therefore only had the regular Saturday and Sunday off.  We did mundane things like clean the closet and the yard...  We also went out looking for the Boys' Day flying carp but there were fewer carp banners flying than we expected.

It is a shame that Japan is losing its traditions with the modern times.  Whereas years ago at New Year's all the cars would be decorated with straw ornaments, that is rarely seen anymore.  For Girls' Day in March, families with daughters would put out elaborate displays of dolls depicting the royal court but more often than not I will hear friends say that though they HAVE the dolls in their closets it is too much trouble to put them out anymore.  (And put them away later!)

And for Boys' Day, the colorful carp that fly over the houses and countryside are few and far between this week.  And we live in farm area where the carp are most likely to be seen!  (It's a little difficult to fly the gigantic carp banners in the city).

Drive, drive, drive... searching out places where Tetsu and I have seen flying carp in previous years.  Hmm...  Have all the little boys grown up and so their families don't fly carp anymore?  Or has everyone gotten so old that it is too much trouble to string out the carp?  Or maybe the younger generation has moved to the cities and the older farmers figure if there is no young family coming to visit they will forgo the carp flying this year.

But Tetsu and I did come upon a couple of farmhouses and though the weather wasn't perfect (one needs a windy day to get those carp really flying!) we stood around waiting for a breeze to come up over the mountains.

We were way back into the hills when we spotted the colorful carp flying in the distance and we followed a private drive back to a farmhouse.  The farmer's wife was out in her fields wearing a prairie bonnet as she worked but she didn't seem at all suspicious of us driving up and asking if we could photograph her carp banners.  She wasn't much curious about us either because she never left her field.

Actually I was just as entranced with the trees in the farmer's yard as I was the carp.  What type of tree are these?  And have they all been pruned and shaped this funny lopsided way?  I think so... 

They remind me of the JRR Tolkien art.

Closer to home we found another set of carp flying over the rice fields.

These had the long vertical banners that sometimes have the name of the child printed onto them.  The banners were so large here that they were getting caught up in the surrounding bushes.

I will keep my eyes out for anymore local Boys' Day carp...  Boys' Day is May 5th so there is still time for the farmers to put them out...

And I've gotten my own little carp tapestry out to adorn our entry wall.