Snipping

One of my friends went traveling to a southern prefecture and she came back with a wonderful present for me.

"You are going to like this!  Open it!"

A small gold box.  And inside...

Thread scissors!  Japanese style!

Most anyone who does any sewing or needlework in Japan has a pair of these Japanese scissors.  They are made of steel and are handcrafted by blacksmiths who forge knives and sickles and other iron products in the Tosa area of Japan.  My friend said she thought I'd be more interested in having an authentic Tosa pair of scissors rather than a cooking knife (she knows me well!)

These are beautifully handcrafted in the method of traditional samurai swords, and the scissors are made of one piece of steel with no hinge or screws.  The blades slide precisely and though I have seen mass produced ones sold in fabric stores, I feel honored to have the real thing with embossed shop's name.

The thread scissors are made so that they can be held close to the blades to ensure close thread clipping and I have heard that traditional Japanese embroiderers will hold the scissors inside the fist to protect the silk fabrics and threads from being touched by hand oils. 


I will take my new scissors with me to Mrs. Furui's house today for some serious thread snipping!

Beading

Recently I have started a new handcraft.  Beading.

I wasn't really planning to do beading but a friend gave me a beautiful beaded broach and as she was teaching two of my other friends how to make broaches, she suggested I come over and try my hand.  And so I did and as we didn't finish up our projects in one period of time we all agreed to meet two weeks later and learn the next step.  And when I'd learned the next step everyone just assumed that we would all start on a new design and whipped out our calendars to choose a date two weeks hence... when I was in town again.  I guess I am going to do beading for awhile.  BUT ONLY AT MY FRIEND'S HOUSE!  I am not going to get started sewing beads at home...  My patchwork is piling up!

So here were the beads.  Actually my friend had three more boxes of different beads.

And here was the design.  Supposedly this was a simple design.  Trace a flower shape on two pieces of felt.  GLUE the braiding onto one of the flower shapes and then sew the open areas with beads.  As you like.  And then cover a button with fabric.  I did that part at home.

This week I glued some silk flower stamens into my beaded flower, sewed a broach pin on the back and added the fabric covered button.  Voila!  a beaded flower broach! 

The blue broach is the one my friend gave me.  She definitely has more beading sense than I do.  Maybe my second time around I'll do better...
 

Flowers and cats

Let's see...  Some miscellaneous photos in my files from last week.  More scenery I'm afraid.  I really do need to go and sew something, don't I?

We often meet these dogs when we take Choco for a walk.  The neighbor's two dogs are very good-natured and don't bark nor lunge (unlike Choco).  They came across another neighbor's cat and had a slight standoff and finally the cat sauntered away.

 Another cat that I noticed but Choco didn't.

While the rest of the scenery is green, there is one field of wheat that is golden.  I always seem to want to take one photo of the wheat field each year.

The dandelions' fluff is ready to soar.

As mentioned, Chip has a pom-pom ball fetish and my pom-pom bird is slowly losing feathers...

"I absolutely love pom-poms."

 These pretty pink droplets caught my eye by the side of a field.

The poppies have turned to watch the sun come up.

So did the blue flowers... though I don't know what they are called.

And this is my style of taking the above photo...  Trying to get below the blossoms at the raised garden...
 

Kathy Nakajima

Yesterday Tetsu suggested we go to a local department store for a quilt exhibit by Kathy Nakajima who is a well known quilt designer in Japan.  I have a couple of Kathy's books and have made a few of the quilt patterns that she offers.  I think she was the quilter who introduced Hawaiian quilts to Japan and she has her own style of doing floral applique and recently stained glass quilts. 

Kathy is originally from Hawaii but came to Japan as a young girl and worked as a model, later marrying an upcoming actor.  She and her husband have been married for some 39 years and she is a little older than I am.  Her eldest daughter passed away a few years ago, but she has two other extremely good looking children.

I have seen Kathy from afar at the Tokyo Quilt Festival where she was featured a couple of years ago and she was autographing books in one of the booths that her publisher/quilting goods producer was sponsoring.  She is always smiling, always seem thrilled with the people around her, the spotlight and her life.  I remember at the quilt show Julie going up to Kathy and telling her how much she admired her.  I would never have the courage to go up to such a famous person no matter how much I admired them.  But I thought at the time how Julie stood out amidst all of Kathy's other fans.

ANYWAY, Tetsu and I went to the exhibition and enjoyed the many quilts.  Unfortunately no photographing allowed.  After making the rounds and pointing out our favorite quilts we were ready to go and did some shopping in the department store.

"Don't you want to go back?  Kathy is supposed to be there and be giving a short talk show?"

"No, no.  Too many people.  I've heard her on TV.  We can go."

But Tetsu kept pestering me that as we were already THERE we might as go back to the exhibit.  Sure enough loads and loads of people with standing room only.  It was a little hard to even see the small stage but we found spaces and then the talk show began and Kathy came out.

As expected, a bubbling personality, lots of fun, humorously talking about being a quilt designer in Japan.   She pointed out some of the nearby quilts and explained the reasons for making some of them, one being a Banyan tree quilt because her husband proposed to her under a banyan tree.

"And today my husband is with me and I thought you'd like to meet him.  Katsuno!"

Kathy's husband walked out to a roar from the crowd.  He is quite a famous actor now and is nearly monthly on TV. 

A completely lovely couple joking together about their long marriage, their lives, their weight.  They mentioned each of their three children and what was going on in the lives of the two they still have.  They talked about what they are doing for the earthquake victims of Kumamoto (the husband's hometown), they talked about how patchwork has played an important part of their lives keeping Kathy anchored to peacefulness and people.

Though the talk show was only about 40 minutes long, Kathy's cheerfulness spread through the crowd and I think lessons were learned and maybe not just about patchwork.  At the end she said,

"It's not often that Katsuno-san and I are featured together.  I know the policy of the department store is no photos but in this little corner I'd be honored if anyone wanted to take our photo."

And with that, everyone whipped out their cell phones and cameras and Kathy and husband posed for us.  I thought that the loveliest gesture to her many fans.  Which I have definitely become!
 

Framing it

I got an idea yesterday that I wanted to try and this morning before our walk I rummaged around in the closet for an unused picture frame.  Tetsu thought I was nuts.

The scenery around us is so beautiful but I seem to take much of the same photos.  Just to get a different perspective, I "framed" some of my shots today.  I know I can do this with numerous photo editing programs that will put pretty photos into decorative framing, but I thought this might be an interesting way to focus on some pretty scenes.

It was harder to do than I thought.  For one, I probably needed a frame that wasn't quite as wide around.

And I still am not sure why in some of the photos the frame was in focus and sometimes it wasn't.  Something to do with using the zoom on the lens.

And I learned that unless I had the whole frame in the photo I missed the point of carrying a picture frame around with me.

 See...  This is what happens when the whole frame isn't in the photo...

I also see now that I look at my pictures that the frame has to be held perfectly straight, not tilted up nor down...

 And try to keep the fingers out of the inner square.

With me peering through my frame, it took awhile to get through our morning walk.  And I may have missed a lot of the larger scenery around me.

Tetsu's captured photo!  Beautiful!

Obento boxes

Yesterday I was visiting with a friend who has a high school daughter and an elementary school son.  My friend is a hard working mother and says she doesn't find much time for herself these days.  She'd really like to do some patchwork or try her hand at tatting but what with a job, a husband and two children she is always running around.  She said her world of creativity is confined to the lunches that she makes for her daughter and she tries to take a picture of every day's lunchbox before she wraps it up and sends it off with her daughter to school.  Looking at my friend's photos brought back memories of the lunches that I used to make for Tetsu and for Takumi and I asked if I could show a couple of her lunch boxes on my blog.

Most Japanese mothers get involved with making lunch boxes for their children when the kids are in kindergarten...  (Or at least in my time.)  Oh, the elaborate lunches I made for my children when they were still in kindergarten.

Elementary school and jr. high school provided lunches but on the weekends when there were club activities and sports competitions I would make a boxed lunch for either Takumi or Leiya because they would be out for the day.

When Takumi got to high school, no school lunches were provided (as is the case with my friend) and so I was back to making a daily lunchbox for him.  These are called Obento.  And while I was at it I made one for Tetsu too as otherwise he was going out for noodles or buying lunch at the convenience store or something.  So for nearly three years after I'd thought I was done with making obentos, I was making two every morning.  But let me tell you!  Not like my friend makes!  Mine were mostly brown (both males in my family liked MEAT in their lunchboxes) and had little in the way of decorations.

My friend's obentos are colorful and nutritious!  Let's see.  Rice of course with some small fish sprinkles on top.  There are a few mini-tomatoes and it looks like fried chicken.  Maybe some pices of fish there too?  And the decorations are strung up eda-mame and some cut-out carrot stars!  Kiwi slices for dessert.

This day's lunch was without rice.  Jam bread, meatballs in sweet and sour sauce, that looks like squid or deep fried fish on the upper right.  And the bears are pre-bought fish cakes made just for the purpose of decorating obentos.  Strawberries on the side.

On this day there were more tomatoes and strawberries and some string beans for greenery...  One croquette, I don't know what those round balls could be...  Maybe chicken meatballs?  Deep fried candied sweet potatoes and ketchup rice with cherry blossom cut-outs made from ham slices.

And this obento had another croquette, some wiener flowers (see how the flower centers are made with a sliver of carrot), some cabbage and sea weed pickles, it looks like a mini-hamburger hidden under one of the cherry blossom cutouts and more strung up eda-mame.  The white rice had soury sprinkles of pickled burdock leaves...

My friend was rather embarrassed at the to-do I made over her obento photos.

"If you show these, everyone is going to know how lax I am about making obentos!  Most of that stuff is made of frozen foods...  The meatballs are just heated up, the ready-made sweet potatoes are just put into the obento frozen and they thaw out by lunchtime.  All the rice sprinkles just come from a jar."

"Trust me.  American mother's don't go to this much work to make an appealing looking lunch for their high school child.  I really want to show your works of art."

The carrot and ham cut-outs... the flower wieners...  A lot of love goes into the lunchbox every morning.

Not that I want to make one again.  My obento days are over.

Ring-around-the-collar

Every couple of years the Traffic Safety division at the city hall sends me new shirts for my uniform.  I have to wear a white dress shirt with a regulatory gray tie during the winter months and a blue summer shirt, (either long sleeve or short sleeve) in the summer months.   I don't go through my supply of shirts very quickly so they sit in a drawer.

Last week I noticed that there was a yellow ring around the collar of my dress shirt.  Hmm... It's been awhile since I gave the collar a good scrubbing...  I decided to bleach the collar before the shirt got put away until the next autumn/fall season.

I put the shirt into the bathroom sink and liberally poured bleach on the yellow stain.

GASP!!!  Practically the whole collar turned bright pink!  Hot pink!!  Florescent pink!  What is going on?

I grabbed the bar of soap on the counter and scrubbed it back and forth.  I pulled out a scrub brush and scoured vigorously.  PINK, PINK, PINK!!!

So much for THAT shirt!  Time to get a new one out of the drawer!  I left the shirt to soak in the sink and checked the Internet for reasons as to why the sudden pink.

"It would be a chemical reaction between the chlorine and whatever is in the sunscreen."  

Well, what do you know.  And yes, I do wear sunscreen.

The advice for the stained shirt was to leave it in bleach and hopefully one would have a completely pink shirt.  Or use peroxide BEFORE the bleach got on it...  Or  just use the shirt as pajamas...

I thought about the peroxide advice and went to the drug store looking for peroxide.  Was it too late for peroxide treatment?  Unfortunately peroxide is called something different in Japanese but deciphering the bottle labels I found pe-ro-ki something, something, something.  Close enough for me.

I spread the pe-ro-ki- something, something, something on my pink collar, tossed the whole thing into the wash (only with rags and old towels) and today I have a white shirt again!  That garish, eye-shocking pink is a thing of the past.

Just telling you.  That's how you rescue a ring-around-the-collar.  I guess this shirt can be used another year.