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You should focus on what’s important: me.

Another WIP

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A month or so ago, my cat helped me turn an old kimono into a dress. I wore it once before, but didn’t get any pictures. Got some pictures this time at the Takarazuka performance of Castlevania!

The first half of the show was the Castlevania story, which was a mix of game storylines and the animated series. Of course, there was a healthy dash of Takarazuka love added to the whole thing. The second half of the performance was the Love Revue, in which gazillions of Takarazuka performers sang and danced while wearing fantastic costumes.

The piano playing itself

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A while back, I got carried away with some flowers, and I knew I wanted to make a fox stamp and get carried away. Last weekend I did! Well, I started it anyway.

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Saw a fun post on Bluesky about showing off art style range, and it was so fun I’ll post mine here too!

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Finissssshed. Now I have no idea what to do with these foxes 🦊

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We had our first family d&d adventure today! My friend’s husband DMed and created a great little story about giant rats in the blacksmith’s cellar. My 4yo’s elf talked to the rats and found out something much worse had pushed them out of their home. I sketched that scene and she colored it. It’s quite charming!

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Two foxy WIPs

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Great workshop today! I was impressed with this first-grader’s embroidered fire truck, and I loved this 4-year-old’s postcards. His mom painted a nice tree, too!

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My 4yo just made her first D&D character and got her first dice. Nerdy indoctrination!

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A little WIP. My kid drew on some fabric and asked me to help her embroider it (AKA do it for her). She’s picking colors, and I quite like the little pink bee.

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I have been turning a kimono into a dress, but this cat won’t let me finish it.

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A while back (3 years ago) I was given a bunch of kimono and haori by an older woman who was selling her house. She told me I could cut them and use them to make something new, but they sat in a box until recently. My daughter discovered the box when we moved, and she loved all the pretty fabrics. We talked about making her a Pretty Cure style fancy dress, but suddenly she wanted a kimono in her size for hanami, cherry blossom viewing.

I did it! I dismembered a kimono, used a yukata dress pattern I got a couple years ago as a base for what I needed, cut, sewed, and voila!

Just for kicks, here she is in the kimono before its transformation. She’s standing on a step stool, making her serious face and pretending to be the ohinasama from the doll festival😂

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(postcards my daughter painted June 29, 2023)

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It started out as a test sample of an idea for the next workshop…

Then suddenly the garden was in full bloom

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Crafts in the sunshine

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Woke up early, couldn’t sleep. Cat and I came out to the 和室 and I spotted my old journal. I started it on my way to Japan, on the flight here back in 2013. I really should start journaling again.

Gosh I had forgotten about that junior high school vice principal who tried to get me to call other teachers 無礼者 (bureimono), or “insolent fools.”

I used to journal a bit in high school and a lot at the end of and just after college, but I was desperate to throw those pages away. Even though this book has some kind of embarrassing things (I literally saved my first receipt in Japan, but that’s def not the most embarrassing thing in this book), I’ll probably keep it for a while longer at least. It shows my first few months in another country, where I enthusiastically tried to learn the local language and even some recipes, explored as far as I could go by tiny bicycle, and realized I would probably live in Japan forever.

There are also transcriptions of funny Engrish I saw on clothing

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Tried melting the plastic bits in silicon molds. They mostly turned out pretty well, but I’m not sure how long they will really hold up. Some of the plastics didn’t really melt enough to stick together well, and others became pretty brittle after melting and cooling. We’ll hang one keychain on my kid’s backpack and see how long it lasts. 😅

Did some small (literally small; they are like an inch across) experiments with plastic bits we picked up at the beach. I arranged them on shrinking plastic pieces and melted it together in the oven. I wanted to test what temp is good for melting the plastic just enough to stick together, not so hot it melts into blobs. Of course, different plastics are softer or harder, but I think I got a feel for that too.