Travels to Morioka

I've had a busy couple of weeks for a change.  A bit of sewing, a bit of working, a bit of traveling too.

As promised, I have a "good" picture of the Robots quilt, pattern from Elizabeth Hartman.  I think I started this at the beginning of September.  Leiya picked out most of the fabrics and I had a friend bring them back from the States to me in August.  I started it cutting and organizing my fabrics into 6 boxes, one for each set of robots and then worked on getting one box done at a time.  I certainly learn organization when doing Elizabeth's patterns!

When all was put together, I opted for doing stitch-in-the-ditch machine quilting around the outlines of all the robots.  I actually thought about doing the stitch-in-the-ditch quilting by hand and got one robot done but there were so many layers and the fabric Leiya chose was a bit thick.  Even Tetsu commented that I didn't look like I was enjoying the process so I ripped it all out and put the quilt under the sewing machine needle.  Leiya loves the finished quilt and I hope Taiga-kun will too (though I have a feeling that Luka may like it more.)

Not long after I finished the Robot quilt, Tetsu and I took off for our annual trip to Morioka.  We're a little late this year and we hoped to beat any snowy weather.  We actually hit Northeastern Japan at the peak of the autumn colors and so it turned out to be a beautiful trip.

Before we left, I had taken a Skillshare class with Fatih, called "No Effort Travel Sketching" and so I prepared square pieces of watercolor paper, my watercolors, brush and pen and committed myself to make "No Effort" sketches during our 4 day trip.  No effort meant (in this case) continuous line drawings with no rough pencil sketches, followed by splashes of color with no thought to shading.

Here goes!

Breakfast at a roadstop in the first few hours of our trip.

We got to a city neighboring Morioka and met up with my good friend, Nobuko-san.  She had suggested visiting a tea-house where a famous Japanese poet had once patronized.

Nobuko-san and I have been friends from the first days I arrived in Japan.  She speaks excellent English but from the very first she has always spoken to me in Japanese and though my Japanese is pretty good, I always speak to her in English.  People used to laugh at our way of communication!

Japanese green tea and a Japanese bean paste sweet shaped as a maple leaf.

Here is the entry to the tea-house and gardens.

My No Effort Sketch.

One of the main purposes of going to Morioka is to tidy up our family grave and believe me, after a year of no care it was overgrown with weeds and fallen leaves.  Tetsu and I spent about two hours pulling weeds and scrubbing the stone and arranging flowers and it looked very nice when we were finally finished.

The first night in Morioka we stayed in a business hotel which was nothing to rave about but we were tired out from the 6 hour drive and the major cleaning job.

The next day, we were back at the cemetery (to admire our handwork?) and since we had time before we were to meet our friends, I pulled out my pen and watercolors and sketched while Tetsu wandered around the cemetery taking pictures.  The cemetery is way up above the city and it really is a lovely place.

My No Effort Sketch.

Tetsu's photo of the cemetery and the city beyond.  I am there in the left-hand corner.

Another No Effort Sketch.

Me sketching in my bullet journal as well.

As we were leaving, we chanced upon a little shed that said "Apples for Sale" with a small box for depositing coins.  We picked up three little trays of apples.

I loved the leaves with the sun shining through them!

No Effort Autumn Leaves.

We spent the next few hours with our friends, originally Tetsu's high school classmate and his wife.  Iku-chan always cooks up a feast for us while we are visiting!

This No Effort Sketch with continuous lines was a challenge as I couldn't see how I was going to do faces.  I sketched Nobuko-san first, lifted my pen and then did another continuous line sketch of our friends and their daughter who was helping in the kitchen.  You certainly can't recognize anyone from my sketch but I know who they are supposed to be!

Sunday morning we visited our home church and though most of the old members have entered heaven there were still a couple of people who remembered us.

No Effort Church Sketch.

This year, we thought we'd gotten smart and we decided to break up the 6 hour drive back to Nikko by stopping at a mountain resort called Zao that is halfway between Morioka and Nikko.  Three hours on the highway and we were at the Zao onsen and relaxed in a Japanese room, enjoyed an outdoor bath and ate so much food!

My No Effort Sketch of the scenery outside our window.

The next morning Tetsu made a change of plans and instead of getting back on the highway for the final 3 hours of our drive, he decided we should take the scenic route and so we headed along a mountain road.  We came across this beautiful torii, a gateway to a shrine, and so we stopped to take photos there for a few minutes.

No Effort Sketching of the torii.

Another stop along the way was at this lake and even though it was cold and raining, we walked along the shore and stopped at a small stand to eat sweet beanpaste soup.

It turned out that what we had planned to be a three hour drive home on the highway, turned into a six hour drive on the back roads, so Tetsu's driving time increased rather than decreased!  My final drawing was in the car trying to sketch as the car bumped and turned on the winding road.

I guess it can be done but it wasn't my greatest.

When I got home I pasted my 12 No Effort Sketches to some craft paper and then pasted those to a bit piece of watercolor paper.  Now I have a great set of colorful memories on my wall!

Once back home, I'm back at the crosswalk (though I took off two days to go to Morioka).  The sweet shop grandmother has persimmons hanging on her laundry poles.  These will dry sweet and moist and make a good dessert in the winter months.

Actually I had taken this photo at our friends' house in Morioka and sent it to Leiya and she was bewildered about why anyone would hang out icicle radishes this way.  Leiya has forgotten Japanese ways!  My friend said she was drying the radishes (they have to hang like this in super cold weather... Morioka has just the right climate) and when they are limp she said she was planning to make pickles.  She puts the whole radishes in a large bucket with brine for a couple of months.

And I guess that's about it for the last two weeks!  Back to more sewing (Leiya's asked me to make her another quilt!  Yeah!)

Where did autumn go?

Summer dragged on this year and even into October we were still complaining of hot days.  

We've been looking forward to the mild days of autumn but those days have whizzed by and suddenly I'm having to bring plants in at night so that they don't freeze and I'm wearing gloves and a neck warmer to the crosswalk in the mornings!  Japanese scientists have been warning us that Japan's beautiful four season climate is going to be shortened to two and that sure seems to be the case this year!

A big event that I got involved with was a school festival promoting the community and school.  Someone knew that I had made cookies for an international event earlier this year so they asked me to make cookies for this event also.  I spent four hours baking 300 homestyle cookies and packaging them up to sell on the big day.  

6 tupperwares of cookies, a bright quilt to attract customers, and my old Halloween outfit that I used to wear to kindergarten events.

The cookies sold out though I didn't have any grand rush of customers...  Marlene had warned me that cookies aren't really festival food in Japan...  In the next booth over the frankfurters on a stick and the deep fried tornado potatoes were very popular but people politely bought cookies as an afterthought...

Other events at the festival were a Japanese drum performance by a local preschool, a tie-dye booth where children could make their own tie-dye T-shirts, a leather craft booth, face painting, pot stickers by a local ramen shop and udon noodles and vegetable soup by the PTA.  The turn out was very good even though it was a rainy day.  The event was successful but I'm relieved it is over!

The only really exciting thing that happened last month was that I won a prize in a Skillshare drawing from an artist from Belgium, Barbara Luel, that I love and follow.  She contacted me to say she would be sending me one of her books and I could choose which of the many.  I chose to have her send me one of her books on Japan!

I was so excited when her package arrived that I saved all the bits and pieces from it and made a page in my bullet journal.  A sketch of the book, a stencil using the cut out on the book's cover, the stamps from Belgium, Barbara's sticker that I carefully removed from the package, bits of washi tape, quotes in the book and Barbara's handwritten return address (which I covered up with an airmail stamp.)

Oh, the book is so beautiful and Barbara's artwork is something to sigh over!  I'm determined to look at every painting on her website and in her book and take all her classes on Skillshare in hopes that some of her skill and technique (if not talent) rubs off on me!

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Leiya sent pictures of the boys at a Halloween event.  Luka was dressed as an explorer, that's why he has bugs and bats all over him.

And because Taiga is rarely seen without a ball of some sort in his hand, he is dressed up as a basketball player...

I did finish Taiga-kun's Robot quilt!  I need to get a better picture taken of this but it is really too big to hold up and try to photograph.  Forgive me if I show you more pictures of this in my next post once I get someplace to photograph it...

That's about it for the past two weeks.  This weekend Tetsu and I are making our annual trip to Morioka to see friends and clean up our family grave.  I hope I have more tales to tell when I get back!

 

October days

For a change I can say that I've had a busy two weeks.  The weather has turned almost cold but there are still more sunny days than rainy.  Typhoon season is supposed to be over and the countryside is changing to fall colors.  We get some beautiful sunrises and sunsets.

Early morning with the moon over the mountains.

Evening skies from our bedroom window.

October is the month for cultural and sports activities and I've been busy with both.

Early this month I took part in a kimchi making class with Nikko City's International Association.  Each fall one of the participants, this year a friend from Korea, teaches a class on cooking from the country featured.  The actual event this year will be next month with a group of children and their parents, but since we will be helping out with the event, most of the members of the association joined in a trial run and we made two types of kimchi.  The afternoon was a great success though the community center where we were having our class asked us to keep our doors closed the next time around as kimchi can really stink up a building!  Tetsu was overjoyed with the delicious kimchi that I brought home and we finished it off quickly.  

I had to attend a meeting with Nikko's mayor because I'm the vice president of the Traffic Safety Committee.  I never really know what I'm doing at these meetings (I had to give a short speech in an official capacity this week) but I stay very close to the president and try to look serious.  (You don't know how much I pray for the president's continued good health.  I certainly don't want to ever step into his shoes!!!)

Taiga-kun's robot quilt has gotten to the flimsy stage!  Yeah!  I sewed the 30 robots together and then spent all day sandwiching and basting to get this ready for quilting.  Originally I had thought I'd hand quilt (stitch-in-the-ditch) this over the winter months but after struggling with it on another day I gave up that idea and ripped out all the quilting I'd done around one robot and put the quilt on the sewing machine.  I have a feeling that maybe the background fabric (the black) is a bit too heavy and I was having difficulty pushing my needle through all the layers.  Even Tetsu commented as he watched me take a stitch at a time, that I didn't look like I was enjoying the process...  I decided that rather than risk getting tendonitis I'd use the sewing machine...  Things don't go perfectly with machine quilting either but I doubt that Taiga-kun will notice or mind.

Marlene and I went out to lunch together and did some shopping at a department store though I only came home with Mister Donuts...

Apple season has started and we go to the neighborhood orchard to buy bags of apples every couple of weeks.  Japanese apples are so sweet and crisp!

On Saturday the elementary school had their Sports Day and because I'm the crosswalk guard, I was invited to that event.  The kids really get into all the relay races and the cheerleaders squad (which is NOTHING like cheerleaders in America.  It is all very strict with slow deliberate movements...  They did have pom-poms though...)  Red Team (Aka-gumi) and White Team (Shiro-gumi) and each side roots for the opposing team as well as their own. 

Tug-o-war was much the same as in the States though this event was children against parents with teachers and custodian coming to help the children's team at the end.

Yesterday I was back at the City Hall to attend a three hour seminar of CPR.  This is required of all the crosswalk guards every two years and we were given instruction and did hands-on work with the fire department.  It was very interesting though I do hope that I'll never have to use any of the skills I've gained.

Today I spent ALL DAY making cookies for an elementary school fair that we are having on Saturday.  I made nearly 300 cookies in my little oven that bakes only 24 cookies at a time (these are rather small cookies).  

They are nothing fancy but everyone likes "real American cookies".  (Japanese don't do much baking at home so baked goods are few and far between.)

Leiya seems to be busy too.  She said she took the boys to Ohio for a couple of days early this month and got to visit with old high school and college friends.

And that's about it for the past two weeks.  Stay healthy!

 

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.