Kudzu Creations 葛の花

One of the most powerful and effective Japanese medicinal plants is perhaps the most prodigious and fast growing plants found in the mountains of Amakusa- Kudzu. The vines grow all over our paragliding takeoff and I am forever losing the battle trying to exterminate them.

The root of the plant is often used to make an immune stimulant called Kakkonto. I often take this in a drink form if I feel like I might be catching a cold- similar to Echinacea. Apparently it is effective for treating hangovers as well. 

In the fall the plant has pretty purple blossoms that have a sweet and fruity aroma. 

The other day as I was waiting for the wind to improve to paraglide, an older Japanese woman came and started collecting these flowers. Heh, this is cool, what is she doing?! I tried to engage her in a conversation and pick her brain about what she was doing, but after a quick rather short explanation she moved on looking for more purple flowers.

No big deal, nowadays with the internet, it’s simple to look things up and try and make something delicious. Of course, it wasn’t so simple. In the end I found various different ideas, but ended up improvising a bit (for better or worse, we shall see).

First, I picked blossoms off the plentiful vines. The blossoms came off easily with my fingers. When picking it’s important to watch your feet because this is the most dangerous season for the mamushi- Amakusa’s only poisonous snake and the suzumebachi- a giant hornet that is potentially lethal (especially since I have already been stung twice).

Once I collected a bag full of blossoms, I spread them out in a colander and inspected for insects, leaves, rotten blossoms etc.

I didn’t wash the blossoms before processing them because I read that this decreases their medical potency. I suppose if you collect the blossoms near a busy road, you might want to wash them well before you more on.

Next I filled 2 plastic bottles with the blossoms.

And then, filled the bottles with 500 cc of water and 500 cc of sugar. In one of the bottles I also added a bit of honey.

Tadaaa! There you have it. Now I just have to put the bottles in a relatively cool place, release the lid a little every day to release the carbonation, then wait and see what happens!

Apparently the flowers have a natural yeast which when mixed with sugar and left to gradually ferment will first become a refreshing drink, then a tasty alcoholic drink and finally a fragrant vinegar.

So, now we have to wait and see! Apparently the color is supposed to be quite change and be quite lovely once the fermentation starts.

Introducing the lovely Payton with her new handmade bag



the back side of the bag was made with upcycled jeans previously owned and loved by my boss, the sides were made using antique kimono material and some denim was thrown in there for some extra strength on the bottom. The leather handle was attached using those cute little leather flower snaps.



a crazy quilt inspired design using all kinds of cute leftover goodies from various projects with lots of beads, trimmings, embroidery added for extra pizzazz.　my favorite part is the pretty girl wearing a kimono!

 



on the banks of the lake where we stayed this summer, Payton poses for a picture with her new handbag. work it for the camera girl!



A bag for Morgan

A playful Asian inspired cotton print by Junko Onishi paired with a baby pink antique shibori japanese kimono material and some solid blue kimono material make for a cute handbag for a beautiful girl.

The bag is lined with a solid light purple cotton material with a pocket for the all important cellphone.



The otherwise boring handles were given some life by sewing around them with coral silk thread.

teeny weeny details were embroidered and beads and sparkles were added at every chance

cute!可愛い！

Interesting video about Boro textiles

Wada on Boro: Japanese Rag Textiles Go from Shabby to Chic from Andrew Galli on Vimeo.
"In Japan, mended and patched textiles are referred to as 'boro', or rags. For some time within Japan boro was regarded with shame because these utilitarian textiles are strong evidence of rural Japan's impoverished past. Nonetheless, boro has begun to attract considerable interest outside Japan."

Scrap Buster Pencil Case

My much loved scraps have now been reborn into a pencil case.
At first my scrap project was going to be yet another book cover, but the finished size turned out to be a little smaller than anticipated (measure twice cut once). In the end I made a pencil case. The zipper was really hard for me to put in, and after wrestling with my sewing machine, in the end I did it all by hand. I had to rip out the zipper no fewer than 4 times, until I finally got it right. How is that for perseverance!
捨てられない残り布が再生しました。可愛いペンケースになりました。ファスナーがどうしても奇麗に出来ませんでしたが、４回目の試み、やっと成功しました。頑張りました。

Scrap Buster mini quilt ミニキルト

I have the hardest time throwing away little scraps of beautiful material, especially antique japanese cloth and material from past projects.

素敵なハギレを捨てるのが苦手です。もったいないと感じます。特に昔の絣や藍染、前の作品で使った物を捨てられない。そう言う問題はありますか。
Following a great tutorial from sewmamasew.com , I set out to get rid of all my bits and pieces of leftover material by making a scrap buster mini quilt.
捨てられない小さな残り布を使って、分かりやすいチュートリアル（個人指導）を受けてミニキルトを作りました。英語分からなくても絵が分かりやすいから見てください。

First I trimmed all my beautiful scraps into perfect square, then carefully arranged them into a pleasing design.
先ずは正方形に布を奇麗に揃って、接着芯に配色を考えながらアレンジしました。


With the iron, I bonded the fabric to the interfacing, and now I was committed.
アイロンで張ります。


With the final arrangement complete, I now dusted off the sewing machine, and started sewing.
完成しました。　今から縫います。

What a simple method to get perfectly straight rows of squares with perfectly matched corners!
先ず、縦の列を一つずつ縫います。縫い代を少し切って、縫い代を割ってアイロンをかけます。
縦の列を出来上がれば今度横の列を同じように縫います。過度が簡単に奇麗に揃います。

素敵。wow!
What should I make, a book cover, a pencil case, a bag, a wall hanging?
何でもに合いそうな布を出来上がりました。何を作ろうかな？　やってみませんか。

Oilcloth Bookcover オイルクロスのブックカバー

Carry your book everywhere and anywhere with an oilcloth piecework book cover!
This is just one book cover in a series, this one using Anna Maria Horner`s oilcloth material.
For directions and inspiration, I googled "book cover, tutorial" and came up with many helpful suggestions and ideas. Don`t you love that red velvet rickrack. I`m such a sucker for trimmings.
What`s beneath the beautiful exterior?  A gaijin friendly, large print with furigana version of Natsume Soseki`s Botchan.
米デザイナーのアンナ　マリア　ホーナーのオイルクロスを使って頑丈なブックカバーを作りました。今度読んでみよう本は外国人と子供に読みやすくしている夏目漱石の坊ちゃんです。

Spring is very rainy and windy this year in Amakusa. I love the yellows and light greens you can find dotting the mountainside.
天草では今年の春は雨が多いです。それなのに山の新緑が美しい。

Gumdrops on my bag

It all started with a beautiful cut of Marimekko material given to me by a friend. The pattern was too beautiful to cut into, so I decided to leave it as it is, and just quilt it. By basting some scrap material around the edges, I was able to make the canvas large enough to fit into my quilting frame, and then came the hours and hours of teeny weeny stitches.


Of course I got carried away, who wouldn`t with this fun pattern. I ended up quilting around each separate circle, and even doing some decorative stitches to make the circles into delicious candies.


To compliment this material, I needed something plain and sturdy, so I decided to upcycle some old jeans. The denim was all machine quilted in simple straight lines using navy blue thread and rainbow colored thread.
The denim shoulder straps (perhaps the best part) were inlayed with little rectangular scraps of material. I initially cut rectangles into the denim and then basted the scraps on the inside. It ended up being something like reverse applique, although I left the cut denim with raw edges for a fun and playful look. One of the rectangle scraps is a piece of material with my inkan (japanese name stamp) stamped on a piece of cream colored material. Now there will be no mistaking whose bag this is. (tee hee)


The inside of the bag was made using a beehive fabric by Echino in pink and turquoise green. This material is darling with bumble bees scattered throughout. The pink fabric was the main material with the turquoise green used for making accented pockets. I also went wild with some pretty purple velvet trim here and there and everywhere. I even covered the raw edge of the zipper with the velvet trim.

In the lining there is a general pocket, a cellphone pocket (with elastic to gather the top), a pen holder (for 2 pens) and the much needed and loved key fob. On the outside there is also a zippered pocket with the turquoise green beehive material used for the inner pocket material.

Problems with the bag:

urgh, really it is basically perfect, but if I had to be picky.....

I should have been more careful when sewing it all together. The bottom of the bag is a little puckered. The style of the bag makes it very difficult to open while it is around my shoulder. I basically have to take it off to get into it. Slightly inconvenient for a lazy butt like me. The top of the bag is closed with a zipper, but since it is rounded the zipper doesn`t lie super flat. Oh yes, and the pen holder on the inside of the bag was placed too high up and is difficult to access. It was a great idea, but would be better a little lower.

I should have machine quilted the little patches on the strap BEFORE I sewed everything together. For some reason it didn`t strike me as necessary until later.

Other then that, it is great, perhaps too great to use!

House Collage

My latest inspirational collage. Guess what I`m thinking about these days.
最近感動を与える写真。　次の計画がだいたい分かるでしょう。
1. House, inspired by fabulous Yoko Saito, 2. House stitching, 3. house quilt, 4. more neighborhoods, 5. DSC01093, 6. Copenhagen, 7. Window, Castelo Rodrigo, 8. Finished Jewel Squares top!, 9. Polka Dot Estates

Check out the locals 四国の伝統的な人形

During the winter holidays in 2009-2010 Rik and I packed up our bikes and headed for a two weeks cycling trip around Shikoku. If you are interested in reading about our trip feel free to surf our blog entries.
As we were cycling in the rather remote area of the Tsurugi mountain range, we came upon these life size dolls of japanese people. First this young lad waiting perhaps for a bus.

冬休み自転車で四国を一周しました。剣山地の道沿いにこんなすばらしい手作りの人形達を発見しました。先ずはこの男の子です。バスを待っている姿なのでしょうか？


A living room scene complete with the entire extended family. Notice the middle age man drinking sake, the young boy with some sticky candy and the sandals carefully lined up at the entrance. I love all the careful attention to detail.

昔話みたいな大家族は素敵で細かな所まで作られていました。

Here is a close-up of grandma and grandpa preparing some goodies on an open stove. Looks almost good enough to eat, especially in our ravenous state.

祖父母が美味しい料理を作っている姿に詳細な点にも細心の注意を払っている。自転車は一日中漕いで、食べ物に飢えてきましたのでこの食べ物なんか美味しそうでした。


Further along the road we found this traditional new years scene complete with a playful kite flying scene.
The humor and the expression in all these scenes was wonderful and left us in a jolly mood for the rest of the day. We didn`t see a single live soul in these villages, but we were assured of their kind presence through these creative scenes from traditional rural japan.

伝統的な昔日本のお正月シーン。作品にはユーモアと表情があふれているように見えます。村では誰も見かけませんでしたが、このやさしい人形のせいで村のすばらしい印象が残っている。

Milo sitting on his Echino Baby quilt. What a big boy! He is hardly a baby.

Riandaria リアンダリア

ta dum. A flower for mom. My first completely original piece, and i love it. It was all hand appliqued, and then quilted (stitch in the ditch) as well as echo quilted. The final product looks like a modern/hawaiian/japanese/leanne invention. My friend gave it the name riandaria...combining my name Leanne (in japanese pronounced rian) with the flower dalia.

Echino Baby Quilt for Milo

After many months of stopping and starting, sighing and groaning, loving and hating, I finally put the final touches on this baby quilt for my nephew Milo. It`s all wrapped up and in the mail, and hopefully will make it in time for the holidays.
何ヶ月の作業がやっと出来上がりました。クリスマスに間に合うかな？

The main light green material found in this quilt is a beautiful cotton linen blend designed by a japanese artist ECHINO. I found this piece on an auction and bought it for a few dollars. The prairie points around the green material are made with various scraps of material; some antique japanese kasuri, other pieces cotton remnants from past projects. I was hoping that a baby would love to touch these little pieces of fabric that poke out from the quilt.
 パッチワークをする時布を切ったり縫ったりするは基本がこの緑の布はそのまま完璧だと思ったので何もせずに利用して、プレリーポイントという工夫を使って、回りは残り布で四角を二回折って飾りました。ベビーキルトだから赤ちゃんはその立体的な布を触るのが好きだろう。

This quilt was all hand quilted and embroidered, including this little spider.
このキルトは全部手でキルトラインを入れました。この小さいクモは刺繍して、可愛くなってきました。

 The bottom and top of the material is covered with leaves, which I outlined with small green and white quilting stitches. The middle of the quilt was blank, so I improvised with my signature squiggles quilted in multicolor thread (my school notebooks were full of these kinds of patterns). 　学生の時私のノートは全部このようなくねくねした線の模様で溢れていた。

The back of the quilt is a checkerboard arrangement of some baby soft, double gauze material designed by Heather Ross in her FarFar Away collection. The light blue sections are full of unicorns, and in the orange area you can find many little snails. This quilt is reversible.
ベビーキルトだから後ろにヘザー　ロスのユニコーンとカタツムリの模様の柔らかいダブルガーゼを使いました。このキルトはリバーシブルだよ。

Coin Quilt Completed

It’s a different world depending which window you look through. My complete coin quilt seemed to me less like a collection of scraps and more like separate little windows framed with pretty white. Do you have a favorite window?

For this quilt I used a bag of scraps that I bought from Anna Marie Horner, as well as other various scraps that I had floating around in my house. The white lattice work was an experiment in using trapunto- a technique where you actually insert extra filler (in my case wool) into the design. The hand quilting took forever to complete, but now that it is finished, I wish I had hand quilted all the lines. The sewing machine is great for doing the piece work, but I love the look of hand quilted lines. Sewing in the ditch with the sewing machine was not nearly as easy as I had expected.

Problems:

Since this was my first attempt at using a hoop, there is quite a bit of variation in my hand sewing, starting slightly irregular and becoming smaller and neater as I improved.

This quilt was designed with the purpose to hide a cubbyhole where I store various odds and ends, including garbage in my house, kind of like a curtain or in Japanese a noren. Rik (my husband) laughed at me and said that our house has the most beautiful garbage hider (ゴミ隠し)in the entire archipelago. Of course it’s true, and what he is really trying to say is that the purpose of the quilt doesn’t really match the design of the quilt.

Live and learn! Personally I can’t wait to install it in our home.

Asian Baby Bag

My latest bag design is finally in the hands of my little sister. Happy Birthday Anita!
This bag was made using scraps from a baby quilt I made last year, Japanese antique kimono material, Shikoku hand woven material and my boss’ old pair of jeans. For the front of the bag I used a pattern called “Orange Peel” to put together these various scraps into pretty flower shapes. Alternating between dark colored circles and light colored circles I think the busy patterns of the fabric work well together.

Making the orange peel pattern was really tricky because of all the curves. The material I used was also not the easiest to turn into beautiful arcs, instead I struggled using a mix of a roulette to first make a curved crease, as well as appliqué glue. Where the various circles came together, most of the seams met beautifully, but I was worried with the type of material I used that there might be some fraying of the seams. I should have made a wider sewing allowance especially with the loosely woven materials. In order to reinforce these weak areas, I put covered buttons at all the junctions. In the end this helps to unite the front of the bag with the back of the bag. The front of the bag was all hand quilted with tiny stitches, echoing the curves of each petal.

I used the bum side of the jeans for the back of the bag. I figured that the pockets would be fun to use for the bag. First, the jeans had to be taken apart, and resewn so that the pockets were straight and functional. Using a pair of well-used jeans gives the bag a very soft feel, and drapes comfortably on your body when you wear the bag. The appliquéd butterflies were made from scraps from the front of the bag to cover some thin areas in the material of the jeans. Also, I thought that Rowan (my sister's daughter) would like to look at some butterflies on her mama’s bag.

I quilted the denim using my handy dandy sewing machine. Sounds easy, but since the material is so thick and bulky the machine revolted and often bunched up. My teacher recommended that I use her free motion machine to quilt the top of the denim, so I jumped on the idea and sat down at her machine only to produce a mess of neither straight nor curved lines of sewing. What a disaster! I took it all out and hand stitched little flowers instead at the top of the bag. Putting the bag together was also a real pain. The thick layers of denim, batting, and scrap material were way to thick and awkward to sew together by machine. Instead I had to painfully sew the bag together one stitch at a time using a thick needle and brute force. I promised myself that I would never make another bag using denim.

I made a matching cell phone/glasses case that attaches to the bag in a clever way using the belt loops from the waistband of the jeans. The material I used for the case was a scrap of beautiful antique material called Aizome, which is a blue indigo dyed material made in Japan. I love this little scrap of material, and cutting into it was really hard. Since the material was a little thin and worn, I first reinforced the material with an iron-on material especially made for reinforcing thin material, and then hand quilted the case following the pattern of the material. I love this little pouch, although it makes the bag not fully reversible, as you most likely want this accessory to appear at the front of your body as opposed to along your back.

The inside of the bag is lined with a deep scarlet red cotton material. My sewing teacher was not very fond of my choice, but I think it’s great. I love how when you open the bag it seems like you are entering the body cavity of the bag. The outside of the bag is so busy that I think that a solid color works best. In the lining I put a zippered pocket and a convenient key fob to make finding your keys a little easier (I personally think this is the best part of the bag).

There you have it, a handy dandy bag made from beautiful scraps. Happy Birthday Anita!

I've got the rainy season blues

This is what happens when it rains all weekend and I have too much free time on my hands.

I'm thinking it will become a pillow, any ideas?

The design was inspired by a beautiful pillow that I saw on Anna Maria Horner's website. I put together a basic design of the flower on Photoshop, and then made stencils to make each appliqued petal. I'm in the process of hand stitching around each petal.

Most of the material I used to make this flower was scraps from my coin quilt project, which is almost finished.

For all those wondering whether I would ever finish the coin quilt, fear not, the end is in sight. Since I mostly hand quilted the entire quilt, it has taken forever to complete. I'm just putting the binding on the quilt, and am feeling a little anti climatic about the whole process. I should feel happy about the imminent completion, but instead I feel a little disappointed. Perhaps after awhile when I have time to step back and appreciate the final product, I will like it better. I'll post a picture of it as soon as it stops raining, and I can hang it up outside to take a nice picture.