Cool weather finally!

La-ti-da-!  I'm so happy that the weather has cooled off.  I'll never complain about cold weather again (says I who also hates cold weather.  Remind me again in the middle of winter!)

During September, even though the days were still hot till about the middle of the month, we could see the season changing with the chestnut trees giving up their nuts over a few days.  The chestnut balls always look "cute" on the trees but once they fall, they are prickly and stab when harvesters try to get the nuts from them.  Even children know that one steps on a chestnut ball with both feet in order not to get stabbed, and pull the prickly outer coverings apart with the feet to reveal the three nuts inside each ball.  For the past couple of weeks the children coming to the crosswalk hand me the chestnuts that they have picked up along their walk to school.

I also get chestnuts from English students and last week was handed two bags of chestnuts from two different students.  In some ways getting chestnuts is a real blessing as they can be delicious when cooked right, but in other ways, I grimace when handed a bag of chestnuts because I know it means a couple of hours of peeling and cooking.

The chestnuts have to be soaked overnight and then boiled to soften the outer peel.  Next they must be  carefully peeled (without cutting into the meat of the nut) and then boiled again to get the bitterness out of the inner skin of the nut.  At about this point, Tetsu heard me grumbling about the job in front of me still after already spending two hours peeling nuts and he joined me for another hour of peeling.  After the second boil I was supposed to throw out the water, wash the nuts again and boil them a second time but I rushed through and added sugar to this third boil.  After an hour of simmering I was supposed to have sweet soft chestnuts but actually they were still hard, and still bitter!  

"This is sure a lot of work for something that doesn't taste so great."  

In the end I continued another hour of simmering and my chestnuts were edible if not the sweet goodness that I'd hoped for.  I made applesauce the next day and the combination was rather good so I guess my chestnut cooking this year was successful.

The bulldozers have been busy behind our house and Tetsu prefers to tear down his garden himself than let the bulldozers do it.  He works a little everyday digging up plants that he'd like to move elsewhere (actually not much of a yard though to move them to) and then watches the bulldozers getting closer and closer.  He looks a little sad even from behind.

As for me, as the bulldozers roar, I stay upstairs in my sewing room sewing robots...

Robot group One.

Robot group Two.

Robot group Three.

Robot group Four.

Robot group Five.

So yeah!  I have 30 robots made!  That's pretty good work for the past month.  The next step is to put these all together into mixed groups and then sew them into a flimsy.  Whew!  I feel like I've gotten a lot done in the sewing department!

The other major project that got completed was the kimono coat I've been working on for at least the past 6 months.  My friend took the coat home to put in button holes for me (my sewing machine doesn't do button holes) and I bought some buttons to be covered in the yellow fabric and pulled out some old buttons that I had bought years ago for the brown side of the coat (actually vice-versa.  I put the yellow buttons on the brown side and the brown buttons on the yellow side).  

Voila!  My reversible kimono coat!  Yellow side out.

Brown side out.  

What do you think?  Tetsu suggests I wear the yellow side out when the weather is rainy or at night as I will sure be visible!

I guess I prefer the brown side though the yellow kimono really shows that this is kimono fabric.  My friend/student let me keep the pattern she made for this coat saying, 

"Now you can make another one by yourself!"  

Hmmm...  Probably not but I know it can be done!

M-san and I have decided that she will make a pretty batik quilt with some jelly rolls of fabric I had in my stash.  She picked out a pattern THAT I HAVE MADE BEFORE and I assured her that she will have a beautiful quilt when it is finished.  I read aloud the instructions THAT I HAVE READ BEFORE and question marks bloom above our heads.  

"Don't panic.  We can do this.  I've made the same quilt before.  We just have to dive in and then it will all become clear."

I guess that is my philosophy about a lot of things.  Just start doing it and it will probably work out in the end...

And that's about it for the past few weeks.  Sewing, and sewing and, as you can see, sketching.

 

The middle of August

Yeah!  We've made it to September!  Everyday I think things are going to cool off and it's true, the mornings seem to have a hint of the aroma of autumn, but the afternoons still get pretty hot.  Here's hoping for the heat to wane next week.

I am happy to report that I am back at the swimming pool after three weeks away while my thumb healed.  Getting stitches out was a breeze and I was back to cooking and washing dishes with no problems.  Drawing I picked back up quickly too though tatting and hand sewing have eluded me until this past week. 

I did get back to at least mornings in the sewing room (with a lot of sweating and cups of ice cream afterwards) because I wanted to get started on a quilt for Taiga.  Leiya chose an Elizabeth Hartman pattern of robots for Taiga and as I'd made a dinosaur quilt from one of Ms. Hartman's patterns a couple of years ago, I was pretty sure I could pull off the robot quilt if I kept myself organized.  I readied 5 boxes to hold precisely cut fabrics for 4 robots and background and now I'm pulling out one box at a time to construct my robots in six colors...  It takes a lot of fiddling but I figure I can get 6 robots made in one week's time.  I need to make 24 robots.  My first 6 robots above.

And my second set of robots finished this morning.  

Leiya reports that recently Luka-kun is the one who has taken an interest in robots so HE may be getting this quilt eventually and Taiga-kun may get a hand-me-down dinosaur quilt...  Anyway, it is good to be back sewing!

You may remember that I was making a reversible kimono coat.  Well, my student/sewing teacher has taken it home with her to put in button holes so I don't have that back yet to model.  I was bemoaning how sewing that coat and not knowing what I was doing, was rather a stressful experience... Well, other friends/students that I get together with weekly and I decided we wanted to make blouses from a summer kimono that I had (this was before the thumb accident) and we also decided not to use the sewing machine and instead hand sew our blouses from start to finish.  One summer kimono got made into three identical summer blouses and it was a much more relaxing experience! 

With scraps, we also made pretty matching brooches.  This has been such a nice cool blouse to wear this summer!

Of course I am still painting and sketching.  One challenge was to paint a room in our house and so I tried to get my living room down on paper.

This is the actual living room.

I scribble sketch while waiting for things...  The vet's reception desk...

A Shinto altar at a ramen shop...

I've started Tangling again, and I really like to find patterns to try.

With pen and in, and sometime a bit of color and a lot of strategic shading, some of these tangles begin to look three dimensional.

They are all sort of fun and they give me a figuring out a puzzle sort of vibe...  Can I really do this?

Cleo is still hanging in there...

John and Tetsu have become friends.

The tearing apart of the earth behind our house has begun and even now I can hear the bulldozers cutting and growling and crashing things to the ground.  I'm not sure how much of this scenery that we have had the past 5 years will remain, but here is a final photo of how we could see Mt. Nantai, rice fields and the undergrowth of the original forest there in the foreground.  Much of the undergrowth will be gone in a few more days...  Already, that building on the right has joined the scenery from last year... part of the complex that is being planned behind our house...

Changes are part of life...

August life

August is winding down and hopefully the summer is too.  It has been just too hot and humid for too long and I'm hoping some cooler weather will spark some new motivation in me.

The second week of August was marked by Obon which is a week where spirits are supposed to return to the family grave and families will welcome them at the beginning of the week with the scrubbing of the gravestones and with offerings of food and flowers.  Family members will gather for meals and visiting and praying at the familiy altars and after the local Buddhist priest visits and offers prayers, the spirit will be returned to the cemetery.  The usually deserted cemetery (at 6:00 AM when we go walking) had a traffic jam in the parking lot with extra staff directing traffic the first and last days of Obon.

On one of the relatively cooler days of Obon, Tetsu and I took advantage of our overgrown garden to have breakfast outdoors.  We have always enjoyed our weekend garden breakfasts but sadly these open-air mornings will be coming to an end as construction will begin on putting a road behind us and the destruction of Tetsu's garden will have to be done next month.  We've been expecting this change for months and that is why the garden became overgrown as Tetsu didn't see the point of keeping it up when we knew it was going to be torn down...

All this disappears in a few weeks...  

So sometime soon, a temporary protection fence will be put up along where the road is supposed to go and completion date for road and factory is sometime in the future two years from now...  We are trying to be philosophical about the changes... Who knows what wonderful thing will result in the river of life?

While we were eating breakfast, we enjoyed watching the little white flowers (that were behind me in the previous photo) wave and dance in the breeze.  Tetsu would love to move some of these plants that we've enjoyed to somewhere new but we actually own so little land that there probably isn't going to be much salvaged...

I made another little McKenna quilt to gift to a friend who helped me out by bringing back from America a lot of fabric that Leiya had purchased and sent to her parents home.  My friend was going back to the States for the summer and she offered to bring a package if Leiya could get it to her.

And look at this haul from Leiya!  When JoAnn's was going out of business she made a special trip to find fabrics for my next quilt that I'm planning to make for Taiga.  As soon as it gets cool enough upstairs I'm going to close myself up in my sewing room for a few weeks and get to work on a new quilt!  I'm so looking forward to it!

M-san finished the quilt that she was making from my 2 inch squares bin that was overflowing.  I think she had fun when making the flimsy but when she got to the machine quilting she messaged me quite upset that things were not going well for her.  The backing was wrinkling, she didn't like how the big quilting was turning out... she was getting very frustrated.  When she brought the quilt over I advised her to add more stitching to her big quilting and to not worry about the backing (she'd done so much that she did't want to rip it all out and start again) and to consider it a learning experience.  Next time maybe we'll tape the backing to the floor before trying to baste it, and we'll probably be more generous in our application of basting spray.

Really, the patchwork backing hides a lot of the wrinkles.

I had been working with 2 1/2 inch squares and did something completely different from M-san's!

So, the summer was going along normally with me nagging Tetsu not to do too much weed-whacking and outdoor work (he claimed washing the front porch in the heat was a cooling activity) and me going from painting to sewing binding, to tatting to both of us going to the pool.  AND THEN ON SATURDAY NIGHT....

...I managed to slice open my thumb with a vegetable slicer when making dinner!  I spent half an hour holding my thumb and pacing hoping to stop the dripping blood but alas, Tetsu had to take me to the emergency room to have three stitches put in.  That put a damper on painting, sewing, tatting, and swimming, not to mention cooking and washing up.

Tetsu has banned vegetable slicer use in our house.

Actually, I've discovered I can still draw and write if I hold my pen in an awkward way...  I thought I'd figured out how to tat with my bandaged thumb but became frustrated because there was no way for me to fix tatting mistakes without thumb use... Going to the pool or onsen has been forbidden for the next two weeks by doctor's orders.  I haven't even attempted sewing... and today's blogging is going slowly as my touch typing results in me hitting "N" instead of the "space bar" on my computer...  Tetsu is doing all the washing up and we've been eating out more than usual...

Staying positive!

Here's hoping that cool weather is just around the corner!

Hot days of summer

Summer business has settled down and now we are left with heat and humidity and a lot of free time.  It is nice to be able to sleep in (no crosswalk guard duty) but it gets too hot to go outside for more than a potty run with John.  Tetsu spends most of the day napping and listening to baseball on his cellphone.

Going to the pool has been the most regular part of our summer routine but even that has changed a bit because though the outdoor pool opened (I love floating around watching the clouds) there are so many children and families that it is nearly impossible to do any swimming.  In the afternoon we are often met with thunderstorms and then the lifeguards all frantically signal for everyone to get out of the outdoor pool and head for safety in the overcrowded indoor pool.

The last week of July our old cat Cleo, suddenly took a crash-dive regarding health and we were in waiting mode for the end to come.  Trust me, you don't want to hear all the details but watching him during this time was terrible...  Japanese vets in general don't believe in putting pets to sleep and Tetsu doesn't really want to consider it either.  After all the animals that we've loved and seen through to the end, I've gotten used to the idea but I am sure if we were in the States the vet would have recommended euthanasia for Cleo.  Surprisingly though, he has come back around and is rather enjoying himself again, eating well, jumping up onto the bed or the windowsill...  He's not ready to give up yet and I've just been happy to have had these extra three weeks with him...

Cleo the black striped kitty is 21.  Toi, the orange one is 17.

While we were keeping watch over Cleo, we were also staying close to the TV as on July 29th there was the large earthquake in Russia which kept the world watching for tsunami.  All of the coast of Japan was on alert the whole day which meant people were on rooftops and in the hills for hours during the horrendous heat wave we were having.  The prefecture we live in doesn't have a coast so basically we weren't affected though Shinkansen and other modes of travel came to a halt for most of the day.  I used the time in front of the TV to do some hand quilting and I finished off my current quilt.

My goal with M-san was to use up some of the leaders-enders squares that I had and she took home the bin of 2 in squares while I pulled from my 2 1/2 inch square bin.  I decided that I probably wasn't going to be up in the sewingroom during the hot summer so I chose to hand quilt this even though it is pretty large.  It was very pleasant to sit in the air condintioned room and work on this for the first days of summer!

Yeah!  Another finish!

Another sewing project that has been in the works for MONTHS has been the renovation of a kimono into a coat.  Let me tell you, this is probably an endeavor I'll never do again... especially the way I went about it.  Probably back in winter I noticed that a lady in the English class that I help with, always wore a shirt or coat made of kimono.  I have so many kimono's passed on to me by my mother-in-law or through friends whose parents have passed on.  I asked the student if she could give me advice on making something out of a kimono and she said she would be happy to make me something.  I appreciated her offer but really wanted to do it myself and so she said she would think about it and find a pattern that would nice.  

A month later (I only help with the class once a month) my student had a pattern ready and an idea in mind for a reversible coat.  I had brought three or four dark kimonos and she evaluated their quality and choose a brown one.  She pulled from her own stash of kimonos, the yellow one and then told me how to mark and baste a pattern.  Hey, I can do to this...  I've sewn quite a bit (not clothing though).  Well, basting clothing (or kimono, I'm not sure which) in Japan is completely different from how I learned to baste (did I learn to baste?).  You use TWO strands of basting thread and very short stitches and then gently pull two layers of basted fabric APART, and CLIP the threads leaving snippits on both pieces of fabric.  Of course this had to be done on both the brown and the yellow pieces...

I don't know how many times I did a step, sent my student a photo and she'd text back, "No, that isn't right.  You'll have to do it again."  Things like I didn't baste my corners exactly or my basting wasn't exactly on the line.  Same with when we got to sewing on the sewing machine.  I'd do the homework, bring it to class the next time and she would say it wasn't exact enough and to take it out and do it again. I really can't complain because my student (now she was my teacher) was always right...  I was never exact enough and things had to be moved a milimeter or so...  I blame it on my laize faire attitude to quilting.  "So it's wonky.  It doesn't matter.  No one will notice."  This was NOT my kimono teacher's philosophy!  It got so that I began to dread working on my kimono coat... And Tetsu wasn't helpful by pointing out that he couldn't imagine me ever wearing a kimono coat (bright yellow at that!).

The reversible coat.  Brown-side out...

Yellow-side out.  I've sent these last photos to my student/teacher and she says I still need to tack the shoulders and collar and maybe take out the hem and do it again...  but as I say, it is too hot to be in the sewing room right now so I'm taking a break.  Someday I'll model this for you...

I've been taking a sketchbook design class with Shari Blaukopf and she gave us the challenge (after showing examples and sharing ideas) of designing a page of things meaningful to us and so I pulled many of the tools of making a quilt and spent a day drawing and painting this.  I'm so happy with it!  And now my latest quilt is preserved on paper!

And that's about it for the past couple of hot weeks!