Sewing and swimming

Blog friend Lois commented that if we had had more time together I might have had my cute guest sewing quilts.  Well there wasn't enough time to work on a quilt but we did do some sewing!

"Okay girls!  I like to sew.  Do you want to sew something?"

The girls hardly had a choice but they seemed willing and I have a few sewing projects that take only an hour or so to do.  I had the girls chose some fabric from my scrap bin and had them trace a pattern.  Pretty soon they were busy with some hand sewing.

 "This is what you do.  Do you understand?  Keep your stitches small or the stuffing is going to come out."

 Such concentration!

I think Yuzuha (the younger) enjoyed this project more than Ageha...  Of course I spent more time helping Yuzuha than I did the older girl...

I sure had a good time!  Tetsu says I look like Aunt Stella from the cookie franchise in my reading glasses...

And here we have the finished products...  Tiny bear pins with bead eyes and ribbon decorations.  The girls attached them to their bags.

While we finished up our sewing project, Tetsu went to pick up his sister in the next town over.  More peace signs...

Another excitement for the girls was to spend some time at the swimming pool and Tetsu and I took them to the pool where we are members.  It was SOOOO crowded with all the children and families in both the indoor and outdoor pools during this hot Obon holiday (return of the ancestors holiday).  Usually I don't spend much more than an hour at the pool for the purposes of just swimming laps but this day was pure play and we stayed for at least three hours while Tetsu's sister watched and read a book in the cool facilities.

And I was very grateful when Tetsu's sister offered to make a dinner of curry rice for us so that I wouldn't have to cook.

I gave her free run of my kitchen and Ageha helped her grandma cook dinner.

A great day!

Was someone a bit tired?

Cute guests

I have been non-blogging for four days because Tetsu and I had some cute guests visiting us!  We had Tetsu's sister's grandchildren with us and we did our best to give them a good time!  We weren't really sure if we were going to be able to pull off this visit because Japan is in the middle of a very large typhoon and the parents were iffy about whether they would be able to drive three hours to get here, leave the children (or stay) and then drive back four days later... 

I said that I thought the purpose of the visit was to give the girls some English experience and so they didn't need parents around while they were visiting.  Tetsu's purpose was to give the children and their grandmother (Tetsu's sister) time together as she has no way to visit them or even have them over.   So it was decided that the 10 year old was responsible enough to take care of her 7 year old little sister and the two girls came by themselves by train!  That was a confidence building experience all on its own!

So Monday afternoon Tetsu and I went to the train station to meet the girls.  They made it!  This is Ageha and Yuzuka.  Ageha is 10 and as tall as I am.  Yuzuha is 7 and was most excited to spend the days with our cats.  We fed the girls a lot of sushi before bringing them back to our house for the evening.  As expected, John was very excited about having strangers in the house and he barked for most of the evening...  We've really got to figure out a way to keep him from getting so upset when people are over...  I can hardly entertain any friends anymore!

But John is pretty good when he is outside (far from his own territory) and so early Tuesday morning (5:00AM) we all went for a walk together.  The girls had said that they would never be able to wake up so early in the morning but in their excitement they were the first ones up this morning!

Proof that John can walk with people fairly obediently.  Ageha did the honors of holding the leash for a little bit.

Yuzuha said this was the first time she had ever seen rice fields...  I rather doubt that because although the girls live in a high-rise apartment in the city in another prefecture, they HAVE visited other grandparents and seen a bit of Japan.  It was true though that for them, this visit was a chance to experience four days of country living in Japan.

About these fingers...  EVERYONE IN JAPAN flashes the peace sign when you point a camera at them. This is true for little children who can barely walk and for old grandmas who also can barely walk....  I think I heard that the custom started when an American figure skater who visited Japan flashed the peace sign back in the 1970's... or it may have started when Olympic athletes were photographed giving the peace sign... anyway, the custom caught on and has stayed in Japan...  I get so tired of all the peace sign photos that get taken...

Part way along our routine morning walk, there is a corner of blueberry bushes that no one but Tetsu and me seems very interested in. 

We stood for a few minutes picking and eating blueberries.  This is real country living!

That is our house there in the background.  Tetsu must have been holding on to John when he took this picture for us.  See how tall Ageha is!  Age 10!

Back at home after breakfast I showed the girls our photo albums of Leiya's wedding and our trip to Michigan.

 Yuzuha was more interested in playing with Mi.

 Mi got a year's amount of love in four days just from Yuzuha.
The night before, Yuzuha had her dream fulfilled by being able to sleep with three cats in bed with her.

More fingers...

Mi IS pretty lovable and she doesn't flash fingers at us when we point a camera.

More tomorrow!
 

Scenery changes

Though almost every day we have had hot humid rain in the evenings (and the accompanying thunder) in the mornings we have been pleasantly surprised to look out the bedroom window to see Mt. Nantai in the distance. 

Yes, the removal of the forest means that we can see the fields and countryside to the north of us and as hoped, Mt. Nantai is partially visible through the remaining trees.

"Are you getting used to the changed scenery?" Tetsu asks hopefully.

"Yes, as a matter of fact I am."

I actually can see the beauty of what had been hidden by my beloved forest these past 30 years (for me).

Mt. Nantai, the largest mountain in our prefecture, is just behind those left trees.  The Kirifuri Range is on the right.  

This photo was taken in the evening just a few steps from our house as John and I enjoyed watching the changing colors of the sky when we went out after a hot day.  

The other day, our friend Toshi-san came over unannounced (meaning that we weren't home!) to see what change had come about and he flew his drone over our house.  Here is the back view of the house.  You can see we are at the end of the neighborhood.  The forest there at the top of the photo is reportedly due to be removed too but I'm not thinking about that and there have been no loggers around for the last two weeks...

Here you can see how the forest was clear cut just past our house...  The rest of that forest is also up for cutting but we hear that the land owner is wavering over costs... The change in scenery may be inevitable but I HAVE learned that one can get used to things and also find something beautiful in the change...  We will just have to wait and see.

In the meantime I enjoy sitting in my sun room looking at the mountains in the distance and listening to birds and cicada

 

Cleaning, sewing and books

It has been SOOOOO hot and humid that we don't go out much and I feel just sweaty and yucky.  And for all that Tetsu decides that we need to clean the upstairs room!  There is NO air-conditioning there and it is another good place to collapse from heat stroke!  We are having guests next week and we do want the rooms to be presentable and thus the major cleaning. 

I just get in the way when Tetsu and I work together (he is so much better at cleaning than I am) but I didn't feel I could let him suffer alone and thus I cleaned my sewing room, making more space in the closet for the overflow from the room Tetsu was working on.  I have made a few resolutions.

Make more scrap quilts as the room is overflowing with scrap bins.

Do not, in any way or form, use cardboard boxes for storage!

So much of what came out of the closet and from under the bookshelf were hidden remnants of fabric and cuts that I'd put away for someday use...  But if I forget they are there and can't see them... well, out of sight out of mind....  I discovered treasures...  In my own sewing room!

So that is what we've been doing...  My sewing room looks great and I wish I could sew!  But it is way too hot to be up there for any length of time and using a fan means that blocks on the design board blow away...  I will have to wait for cooler days to get some sewing done.

I did finish up the baby quilt that I'd been machine quilting..  This was a very nice panel with even the quilting lines marked out on it and so I didn't have to do any thinking at all.  Is this for a boy baby or a girl baby?  I think it is a boy's baby quilt (and I sort of need a girl baby quilt) but there are some flowers on this...  I don't really need to give the baby's mother anything but as I've got this quilt... better than nothing?

On a completely different line of thought, Mrs. Furui gave me this book a few weeks ago as her sister had helped with the translation.  It is the story of the Tsunami disaster at the elementary school which lost most of their students that tragic day.  Not light reading but it was very good and insightful. 

Not published books, but books I had made for myself.  Leiya's wedding album that I had made through Mixbook. 

We are so happy to have this beautiful book which I had made with heavy stock-board and personal touches (like scattered leaves and lettering etc.)  It was a rather expensive album for 20 pages but so worth it!  I love taking it with me to show people and looking through it myself... 

Another book I had made was through Blog2Print which was the only website I could find for slurping blogs into books.  In the past I had used a different website but for some reason they've stopped offering blog "slurping".  Our two weeks in Michigan in May were so wonderful and I had written so much detail on my blog that I decided I really wouldn't go back to look at the blog posts even though they were there...  and I really wanted to be able to relive those days... 

This was a hefty book too (in price also) because there are 158 pages of blog posts!  The cover is paper, the photos are all one size, but the quality of the pictures is excellent and I am so thrilled with this book too!  My only "complaint" is that I really didn't need my blog signature (which is considered a photo) after every post but I couldn't figure out if it was possible to remove all the signatures...  So there they are. 

 Okay...  back to working in the heat!  John is rather heat exhausted also!

The Selah quilt finished!

I'm a bit disappointed in my photos today but I'm not disappointed in my quilt.  The Selah Circle Challenge is finished!

As advised by blog friends, I have spent the last week quilting the middle of the Selah quilt. It looks much better, at least no puckering, but the quilting doesn't really show up very much.  In the center around the words I continued with grid quilting the same as I'd done around the circle of flowers.

Then around the flowers on the inside and the outside, I have quilted feathers which ended up being done freehand.  My marking pencil didn't show up and I got to thinking that if I can do freehand feathers on the machine then I should be able to do them at a slower pace by hand. 

Thus my feathers aren't uniform around the wreath of flowers but they can't be seen very much anyway.

One reason for the invisibility of the quilting is because of the deep blue color and batik blending of the fabric, another reason is because I didn't want the quilting to interfere with the flowers and words and so I used matching thread. 

It is only on the outer border that I used white thread and that border of feathers shows up a bit better.

The quilt pattern is called Insomnia by Lotusland and Queenie gave it to me when I saw her at the Tokyo Quilt Festival at the beginning of the year.  So...  this took a little more than 6 months to make.  Mrs. Furui took one look at this and said,

"And you are the one who said she didn't like applique!"  I guess I do now!

It is so nice to have a finish!