Useless but cute

Yesterday was patchwork day at Mrs. Furui's. I found her busily making these darling little cats! She had found them at a tea shop somewhere and thinking that many of her patchwork friends (there are seven of us) would like them, she pondered buying enough for all of us. At $2.50 a piece though she decided to buy one... take it apart... make her own pattern... and then make them herself. This is the result of her work.

When I arrived she was in the process of putting beads into them and gathering up the bottoms. She wanted me to wait until she had all of them made before I took my picture "since they are so cute all together."

Other people began arriving for patchwork.

"What are you making Mrs. Furui? Are these for the kindergarten bazaar? Are you going to sell them? These would be great for our church bazaar in a few weeks. We can always sell useless things that are cute."

WELL! It's a good thing that Mrs. Furui doesn't take offense easily! In fact she laughed so hard that she had to write down that phrase for crafting posterity.

"Useless things that are cute"

To make matters worse, two of our non-cat lovers declined the gift of a useless but cute cat! Poor Mrs. Furui! BUT yours truly and another cat lover squealed in delight and took home two each, while everyone else was pleased to receive their one useless but cute cat.

Actually I brought home two other useless but cute objects for my house. I stopped at the bread shop on the way home and found these cute hedgehogs on the shelf. I asked if I could take a picture and they gave me two of them for my OWN shelf! Adorable!

Unfortunately my cats think the useless but cute hedgehogs should be used... as cat toys... so I've already had to rescue the hedgehogs from under the dining room table.

Two pairs of sandals

Rice harvesting has started in my area and the other day Choco and I stopped and visited with one of the farmers and his wife and they seemed pleased to tell me about their rice fields.

This nifty machine is the farmer's pride and joy. He has quite a few fields and he will go from one to another for the next couple weeks. The machine picks up the fallen rice stalks, cuts them at ground level, turns and inserts them into the thresher, collects the rice, chops up the stalks and spreads the chopped stalks back on the fields all in one sweep around the field.

Later when the rice bin is full the machine sends the rice up the pole and it is dropped into a small truck to be carried back to the farm. The farmer proudly told me that his machine cost him about the price of a luxury car and he bemoaned the fact that he only uses it for two weeks during the harvest season! But he said that if he takes care of it he will be able to use it for more than 10 years.

After the rice fills the family truck, the wife drives it home and puts the rice kernels into their husking machine and it will take about an hour to husk the rice to brown rice stage and bag it. In the meantime the husband works in the fields and by the end of the day they will have half the field done...

While waiting for the next load the wife wanders around the field picking up missed rice stalks but she says the new machines make life much easier for her and really her husband could do the whole job himself... He just likes her company.

The farmer's wife was telling me that though her husband is a farmer, he also works at another job during the year. The company is very understanding about his being a farm owner though and they allow him to take off time in the spring for rice planting and in the fall for the harvesting. This is called "ni soku no waraji". Having your feet in two pairs of straw sandals...

And both of them were resigned to the fact that their eldest son was probably not going to take over the farm for them. The younger generation rarely want to be full-time farmers and it probably isn't even economically possible for most of them. Most companies are not going to give "farming time off" as the father has and so gradually the fields are becoming untended... What will happen to the Japanese rice industry in the next 20 years?

Window treatments

I like to wash screens. No take that back. I DON'T like to wash screens but I like seeing the world through freshly washed screens. Same goes for windows. Clean windows brighten a weary heart. But windows should be washed on an overcast day and screens should be washed on sunny days. This week has been sunny so the screens are getting a scrub.

I also just now fixed our Japanese room window shades. Actually I fixed one shade just last week and two days later Cleo had gone through them again... The perils of having cats in a Japanese house... They learn that paper shades are easy to tear and if they want to look at the world on the other side of the shade cats have no qualms at all about making their own peephole.

So two of my windows have holes in them. Since the last paper shades only lasted two days, this time I went out and bought CAT paper shades. That's what it says right on the box! A little more expensive but these are made of PLASTIC not paper! Supposedly no one will be able to tell (except the cats who can't claw through them).

The box has enough paper/plastic for one full length window. I decided to spot repair rather than replace the whole window... That may have been the wrong choice but since only one corner is holey maybe I can fix two windows...

Cut away the ripped part.

Use double sided tape (purposely made for Japanese windows) and cut the plastic sheet to size (or lay over the whole window per instructions).

Yeah! Fixed within 10 minutes!

OOooh! I DO like that! A lovely little cherry blossom design hidden in the paper/plastic that only shows through when the light hits it. (Yes, I do see where Cleo has gnawed away on the wood too but I don't know how to fix that.)

I hope the cats don't like it too much too. Off to fix the other window. ... And maybe wash more screens.

Pumpkins

Yesterday Tetsu solved this year's problem of getting a Halloween pumpkin. My goodness, it is only mid-September!

For a couple of years now I have written about the problem of finding a pumpkin. Yesterday though, Tetsu took me off on a secret mission to the north of the prefecture and we brought home pumpkins! It seems that there was a pumpkin growing contest out in the countryside and the non-placing pumpkins were being given away to people and institutions that wanted them. Tetsu read in the newspaper about the already ended competition and called to find out if we could receive one of their pumpkins.

I wasn't let in on our mission until we pulled up at a home with huge pumpkins dotting the yard. Tetsu had gotten driving instructions and been told that we'd know the place because there were pumpkins all over. There were pumpkins balanced on boulders, pumpkins on the walls, pumpkins sitting on the roadside!

These pumpkins are sitting beside an old antique gasoline pump that I thought was interesting. The lady waiting for us let us take home two of her pumpkins (it took a lot of Tetsu's man power to get them in the car!) and one of them is sitting on our doorstep to remind us that autumn has arrived.

I'm driving into town in a few minutes and taking the other pumpkin to the kindergarten. I sure hope I can find someone who will help me get it out of my car!

Thank you Tetsu! It was a lovely treasure hunt sort of day (of course we got lost along the way again!) with a orb of gold waiting at the end!

I SPY quilt

I finished my Kitty quilt yesterday. This pattern is from Mary's website and is called the Happy Block pattern. I thought I was the quilter who didn't have any bright fabrics but I must have misread myself because this is definitely a BRIGHT quilt! I love all the colors and I love all the kitties and doggies in this.

This was made for my mother who was so entranced by the fabrics June sent to California. I found I had a few more prints that people have sent me over the years and with very little repeat I was able to make the 35 blocks.

Look at this hodge podge back! Lorraine had sent me a "kitty newspaper" fabric that seemed a shame to cut up so I cut a "page" and added it as extra reading material for my mother.













I also made an I SPY list for her to check out and play around with.

As usual I got hung up on the quilting because I didn't know if I wanted to do this by hand (stitch in the ditch) or machine quilt designs in the solids or do an overall quilting pattern. I opted for overall though it turned out not overall after all. Every time I came to a kitty square I hated to quilt over the kitties so those are pretty puffy... That's one way to do it!










And if truth be told, my quilting had wrinkles and a couple folds in the back. I spent a good hour taking out one whole corner that just would not pass even my usual laisez faire attitude... BUT! I found I had this cross stitch piece that I had made YEARS ago from a kit and after I'd finished I didn't know what to do with it. Hey! Old cross stitch pieces make excellent cover-ups for machine quilting bloopers!

I thought the cross stitch kitty matched this little kitty on the front very well!

This is ready to send to my mother. I hope she'll enjoy many hours looking at it!

Autumn finally

We had a typhoon in my part of the world and some parts of Japan got a lot of rain! I hurried home from teaching in the next city over and brought Choco inside before the rain and wind got too strong but in the end, the area where I live didn't have much damage. I am grateful because my pear orchard friends really live on the edge when a typhoon hits. Their year of crops is likely to be destroyed overnight and there isn't too much they can do about it... We are on typhoon number 9 this year and there are probably more to come (they strike in late summer and early fall.)

The winds cleared the mugginess from the air though and yesterday morning we woke up to cool and fresh feeling countryside... The rice farmers will probably be a little disgruntled because the winds blow the heavy rice shoots over making it more difficult to harvest. Their combines are pretty good though and the machines can go along and lift the shoots before cutting them... I think harvesting will begin next week in my part of the world.

This was taken around 6:00 am. Can you see how the rice has toppled almost making waves in the field? Sort of looks like some quilting fillers I've seen.

The mountains are cool looking in the distance...


Autumn has finally arrived?

WASH YOUR FABRIC!

Yesterday the Hawaiian quilt that was up on the living room wall fell down. It may have just fallen of its own accord or maybe one of the cats tried to climb up it. (It is easy to blame most problems on the cats.) Even though summer isn't over in Japan (HOT! HOT! HOT!) it seemed a good time to put up a different quilt and so I pulled a very old Carolina Lily quilt out of storage.

Oh dear, this doesn't have a label on it either... One year we made a similar quilt for the kindergarten bazaar and a couple of us decided to use the pattern to make our own quilts. This must be at least 15 years old now... Anyway... When I made this I figured it was a good chance to learn how to use the Celtic strip metal ware for making strips though not long afterward I learned how to use Bias Maker with iron on Hot and Bond tape. My Celtic strip maker lies forgotten in some drawer these days. This was also in the days before I was experimenting with machine piecing and machine quilting so this is all done by hand. I was very proud of myself.

BUT!!! One day I washed my Carolina Lily quilt and look what happened!! The dumb fabric bled! Upset isn't the word! I remembered really liking the dark blue scrap that a fabric store had given me when I purchased other fabric. It had come in a packet of give away stuff and though there wasn't a lot of it (maybe a fat eighth) I had been so pleased when there was JUST enough to make the lily petals...

Yes, I do normally wash all my fabrics but there are times when I get lazy, and there was such a little amount of this blue that I'd figured it would fray away in the wash... A lesson learned...

So up on the wall my quilt went yesterday. I couldn't decide where that stained blue corner got hid the best... On the top it seemed too obvious. On the bottom it is right at eye level. I thought behind the lamp but the light seems to accent the stain doesn't it? Ah well...