Thank you

Wow... Was I surprised to open my blog window today! I sure didn't expect the number of comments to yesterday's post! I hadn't felt criticized to begin with about why I blog...the blog friend's comment just spurred me to think about why I was writing daily. But THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU for the surge of compliments!

So back to the regular scheduling of an animal-loving, Christian quilter in Japan...

Yesterday, my friends and I gathered for a patchwork day at Mrs. Furui's.  Actually Mrs. Furui who leads the kindergarten Mother's choir, had to go to the kindergarten for a choir performance for about an hour, but she left the rest of us with a pot of tea and hand sewing to do.

And though my quilt doesn't have the binding on it yet, here is a nearly finished Star Within a Star quilt.  The stars were all made by my patchwork friends.  I started hand quilting this at the beginning of October.  In retrospect, now I can understand the general rule about using curved quilting on straight pieced quilts... my straight quilting gets quite lost in all the stars... but this is what it is.  

And here Mrs. Ochiai caught me sewing binding.  I don't mind Mrs. Ochiai taking my picture.  She always can take at least 5 years off my real age!!!

Whoops.  Mrs. Furui came back from leading the choir.  Doesn't she look like the strict teacher watching over Mrs. Yamaguchi?  (And can you tell I'm having trouble figuring out how to adjust my camera?)

We pulled out books trying to come up with an idea for NEXT YEAR'S bazaar quilt!!  Aren't we the eager beavers!  No decisions yet, just a lot of peering through patchwork books, a lot of chatting and a lot of tea.

Thank you again!