Jewel box flimsy

Well, the Jewel box won out over spring and finding the heater. At least to flimsy stage. I've opted for no borders just because this is large enough as is. And I'm not sure what I'm going to do about quilting this. If this is going to be machine quilted then I'd better go look for the heater some more. If this is going to be hand quilted then I can stay in the warm downstairs.

I'd prefer to do this by hand just because I still have about three months until my friend's grandchild will be born. I also like hand quilting for the soft feel that it gives a quilt. That seems right for a baby quilt. But so far I can only imagine hand quilting down the middle of those chains and maybe around the "jewels" in the center of the blocks. Neither of those need any marking (I use masking tape to "draw" my straight line) so if I can find some nice backing in my stash and get this basted I could start quilting tonight.

My feathered star is going to be lonely again...

Brrrr

I thought of another reason why I'm not getting much sewing done. At least not upstairs in my sewing room. IT IS COLD UP THERE!

Somewhere in this house is a very small electric foot warmer that I remember using last year in my sewing room. It fits under a desk and blows warm air out and it does keep the lower legs warm. Not so great for the rest of the body and it is too small to heat the whole room. That's beside the point because right now I can't find it. (Where do things go in this very small house?)

I have heard that houses in the northern part of Japan have excellent insulation and with a small amount of heating the whole house stays warm. Not ours. I sometimes wonder if there is any insulation at all in our house but Tetsu says

"Well, what do you want to do? Knock a hole in the wall to see? That is sort of defeating the purpose."

He claims we have insulation but at the same time he complains that he can't sleep at night because of the cold.

Our living room, dining room, kitchen area is kept warm by a kerosene heater that does a fairly good job. All of us, animals and humans vie for the closest spot next to the heater in the mornings but it will heat up the downstairs (brace yourself for any trips to the bathroom though.) No heat upstairs at all except for the little one I can't find. None of us go upstairs much (oh, but Vel has his own electric cat heater that he sits on. He seems satisfied).

Today in the sewing room my fingers were freezing up and aching as I sewed and I could hardly grip the pieces of fabric. Going slightly numb? This is ridiculous. Go look for that little heater. But I haven't found it yet. What I did find were some hand warmers that leave your finger tips free but add a layer to the rest of the hand. Without these I might have to resort to sewing with gloves on!

So my problem is temporarily solved, at least until I finish the Jewel box quilt. Or I find the heater. Or spring arrives. Which do you think will come first?

Refrigerator full

Yesterday I had a full day of sewing. There hasn't been one of those in just ages and once school starts and I'm back on a regular schedule these will be few and far between. I decided to make use of my leader-enders squares and get started on a Jewel box quilt. Velvet thought that was a great idea and offered to help me hold them down...

Because I already had the smaller squares, I spent most of the day sewing those together and cutting out larger squares to make triangles. This is a scrap quilt and it seemed like a good chance to use up some of my smaller pieces of fabric. I have a large basket of crumbs and other stuff that gets thrown in there that are larger than crumbs but strangely shaped. In fact most of the stuff should be thrown in the trash but there is always a tiny bit of something that is needed for applique and so I paw around strewing fabric petals all around me looking for a certain color.

Has this ever happened to you?

"Hmm. I need some green in this quilt. Any green in this basket? Rats. Not a single piece that is the right color green. Okay. How about pink? No pink that I like either. Orange? Purple? Blue. Nope none of those colors that would match. Well. What IS in here? A lot of lights."

"Okay, now I need some lights for this quilt.... WHY ARE THERE NO GOOD LIGHTS IN THIS BASKET? WHAT IS ALL THIS STUFF?!!!!"

That was sort of how the day went. Why is there all that fabric but nothing that would work well in my quilt? It reminds me of when my brother was a teenager and he looked in the refrigerator overflowing with ketchup and salad dressings and relishes and moldy cheese and said,

"Why is this refrigerator so full but there's nothing in here to eat?"

This is my Jewel box quilt still in components up on the wall. Not too thrilled about the choice of lights there... This is a baby quilt so I could stop at two blocks by four or go on and make it three blocks by three blocks. I'm headed upstairs to work on this again.

Piano

Yesterday someone caught the word "piano" in my post and wondered if I played the piano. The answer is a resounding, NO!

We have a piano. I suppose I should be able to play the piano. As I child my mother had me take organ lessons on a full pedal electric organ. I played the organ from age 8 until my first year of college and one of the reasons I chose the college I went to was because of the spectacular pipe organ in its chapel.

BUT... Once at the college and noting all the serious music majors around me and realizing that I could not read music led me to drop organ very quickly. But I did spend one semester playing the spectacular organ! (Picture from the Internet of the Lewis and Clark pipe organ)

Yes. I cannot read music. I don't know how that small skill evaded me after all my years of playing but it did. I secretly believe that music and mathematics are connected and because I can't keep track of numbers either that is why I can't understand what quarter notes and eighth notes etc. are. Anyway. I stopped playing the organ very easily and have never regretted it.

I had never played the piano at all when one summer I came back from America and found a piano in my very tiny apartment! Tetsu had bought it while I was gone! During a phone call I had mentioned that 10 month old Leiya had enjoyed a high school recital that we'd attended and Tetsu, the doting father, thought his daughter was going to be a music prodigy and bought a used piano. Except for the fact that we had to sleep under it, I didn't mind having a piano. I could pick out children's songs with one finger and Leiya liked banging on it.

When Takumi was 5 we started him on piano lessons and he actually seemed to have an aptitude for it. As he got older he played Joplin and Chopin and got to be very good. Leiya started lessons too but didn't seem to enjoy it as much as Takumi and when both kids were entering Jr. high (after years and years of lessons and yens and yens of music fees) we marked that as "graduating" from piano so that they could pursue Jr. high club activities.

Takumi spent two weeks again practicing Chopin when he was a third year Jr. high student, I suspect in order to impress his friends and teachers at school (he looked much like a gang member and he's playing Chopin?!) I think he liked the congruency of his image and his music. Once he impressed everybody he's never looked at the piano again. I'm not sure if Leiya appreciates her music background though I used to tell her if she wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, in Japan, she had to be able to play the piano. (True!)

Nowadays my piano sits unused in our living room. The cats use it as look out point and find it a good refuge area from Choco when she is in the house. I have thought about sitting down to the keyboard and practicing some hymns just because our church so desperately needs someone who can play the piano well but that would take away time from patchwork and quilting and I don't really want another hobby.

"God, I don't suppose You want to strike me with the miracle of sudden musical ability?"

I found my quilting thread. Yep. Under the piano where the cats had batted it. The piano seems to be a great place for accumulating clutter (and dust!). You'd think I could come up with a better use for a piano.

January sewing

The first quilty content of the year.

With a little time on the computer I was thinking I'd like to do a BOM and a couple of blog friends had pointed me to Bunny Hill a few months ago. I really thought that this was a cute BOM and though I'm not usually up for cutesy things nor am I a great fan of applique, this looks small and the results would be different from anything I've ever done before. So I've downloaded the instructions (this was a BOM for 2009!) and have made one block. So far so good.

I can see some of my patchwork group following along on this so I will share it with them and see if anyone else wants to make a game of it. (Of course we are still in our mini-Round Robin game and that is going nowhere so far...) It is always fun to be making the same quilt at the same time and see what the different personalities come up with.

A new blogger has entered cyberspace and Yuki's first picture shown on her blog was of a Jewel Box quilt which reminded me that I wanted to make this someday. I had saved the instructions from Nancy's blog and I've been looking for a pattern to make a baby quilt so this is it! I even cut up some fabric this morning!

When I was getting ready to go back to my quilting and patchwork I couldn't find any embroidery thread, any thimbles, not even any quilting thread!!! I guess I cleaned up too well. I found the thimbles and embroidery thread but have not yet spotted the quilting thread. Maybe the cats found it before me and it is now lodged under the piano. My feathered star quilt is waiting for me...

New Year's food

What do you do during the New Year's holidays? We seem to eat.

At one time I had thought I could blog about Japanese foods and authentic meals that could be reproduced in a kitchen outside Japan. That sure was far off the track because I'm not very good in the kitchen and I realized that most of the ingredients we use in Japan you can't get easily in America (and I assume in other parts of the world). So I just show pictures of food which I've no idea is interesting...

Basically I don't do traditional Japanese cooking. If I attempt anything I often use the premade sauces or mixes that are available. We had sukiyaki for our New Year's dinner. Well, that is thinly sliced pieces of beef (I mean paper thin! That is the most common way meat is sold in Japan) konyaku noodles (made from a glutinous potato) grilled tofu, long onions, enoki mushrooms, shunniku greens. See, I told you. What do you recognize in that list? And to make life easier I bought a bottle of sukiyaki sauce and dumped it on top of everything in our cast iron pot. It was delicious! But you really need the pot to make it authentic sukiyaki. I don't think a fry pan will do. (I mean it will but somehow it just becomes a fry pan meal rather than..... ~~SUKIYAKI~~!) And then you dip your meal in a raw egg as you eat. How many of you are going to try to serve that to your family?

Yesterday my neighbor invited me over for lunch.

"We just have left-overs so it will be simple. Don't bring anything."

Tetsu was working yesterday so I took Mrs. Yano up on the offer... And had to laugh when I got there. This is what she calls a simple lunch? I haven't eaten like that the whole year long. And then she had a laugh when I whipped out my camera and started taking pictures of her table loaded with food.

Okay. Let's see. What was there. Simmered red snapper, three types of salads, pickled Chinese cabbage (from her vegetable garden), pickled daikon radish and carrot (from her vegetable garden), simmered burdock root, grilled fish and egg rolls, sweet omelet, sweet bean gelatin, fish eggs, steamed fish cakes, candied fish, burdock seeds, burdock and carrots wrapped in sea weed, two types of simmered potato (from her vegetable garden), sweetened pickled plums, cold tofu skins and raw octopus.

Now how much of THAT are you going to be able to eat? I love it all! That's maybe why my Japanese friends feed me so much. They are surprised that I can eat their traditional food without making too many comments except for "delicious!"

This morning I'm alone (Tetsu had to stay overnight at the convalescent home last night) and I opted for more omochi with ground black sesame powder over my usual granola. Do you think I've lived too long in Japan?

New Year start

Look at what got pulled out of the closet now that Christmas is over and my knitting is done. Yes, I'm going to quilt again. If Toi would move. He is very happy that he can sit in the quilting circle again!

New Year's day saw us at a church service yesterday morning.

Usually Japanese will spend the first two or three days of the new year making the trek to a shrine in order to pray to the gods and buy good luck charms. This is called Hatsumode, the first shine visit. Japanese don't "attend" shrines and temples for weekly services but will go on certain festival days and at the new years to buy trinkets to keep year round in the family altar or hang in their car etc. It is maybe more of a custom than a belief but a few coins are thrown to the gods, and families will visit a nearby shrine and enjoy sweet osake, grilled squid and warmed-over oranges from the booths along the way.

There were a couple of times before Tetsu and I were married that we joined the throng of people doing Hatsumode but somewhere along the line as Christians, we desisted in the custom and instead attend an informal church service. It lacks the noisy, rambunctiousness of Hatsumode but is a pleasant way to greet church family members on the first day of the year... This is an average turnout for a church service in Japan. Christians still make up less than 1% of the Japanese population.

After church Tetsu and I took over a block of omochi to Tetsu's mother. Omochi is pounded rice and is a necessity for welcoming in the new year. It has no taste in itself but after toasting can be served with sweet bean paste, butter and sea weed, sweet soy bean powder, grated radish etc.

My pear orchard friends make about 40 kilos of pounded rice (like 100 pounds!) and then form it into balls and blocks and shapes to give away and display around their farm.

I'm afraid I don't understand it all but for each farm building they own they need to decorate it with a few balls of pounded rice. And they always give Tetsu and me a huge slab of omochi which we split with Tetsu's mother.

This is my long time pear farmer friend, Kyoko-san with one of the MANY slabs of omochi that she was giving away to poor people like Tetsu and me who usually have to resign to supermarket bought chunks of omochi. Tetsu's mother swears that Kyoko-san's omochi is the best she's ever tasted!

Happy New Year!