Hello again!
It's Hina Matsuri (Girls' Day) today. And of course we have set up our hina dolls and pray for the happiness and health of our daughter.
We don't hope she'll be marrying too quickly, so we let the dolls a little longer on display and hope that there some truth to the superstition, that girls whose families are slow on putting the dolls back into their boxes will be having trouble getting married :)
The final bag of hina arare (puffed, sugar coated rice and beans) will be eaten during this week. It has been a month of puffed rice, and I look forward to see the supermarkets redecorating the shelves, putting away all the pink stuff that seems to be overly appealing to my girl...
Detail of a group quilt at this year's quilt show:
They come out for Hina Matsuri every year, too. This year gathering on the floor of our washitsu - japanese room.
In our living room, on the floor: I am watching the falling petals with diligence as there are quite some caterpillars mixed into, mysteriously only visible when having fallen off the branches...
Another mystery going on here is my new found love for cute and colour.
After about a year of preferring simple and natural looking things and staring at my stash of fabrics in a rather reserved, even stunned manner, I started making a really bright and happy quilt for Dagny.
Using many of my old favourites, a lot of pink and red, cute japanese patterns, treasured tenugui as well as fabrics that I used for making clothes for Dagny when I started sewing for her about six years ago.
The main part of the quilt is constructed with a single block, which makes it a One Patch Quilt as Jennifer of moving hands explained to me (yes, I indeed do not know much about quilts!) when we met at the quilt show in January.
And while the quilt's design had been on my mind for some time, the motivation to actually make it came from the Wa-Quilts (Japanese Design) on the show - always the ones that capture and inspire me most!
The block I use is looking like waves or scales and the quilting will most likely simply follow that shape. But we'll see about that when it is time.
Hopefully soon.
I mean it.
I am sewing by hand, which takes some time, but the seams are soft and it's easy and I am enjoying it a lot. I feel like slowly getting back to be a patchworking person again.
Stitch by stitch.
I will take more photos of the quilt from now on and tell you about my progress here on the blog.
Hope this will be the one full sized quilt I finally manage to start and finish...!!!
Tomorrow I'll be joining a Ikebana class and am curious how that will be.
And after that there will be the knitting class again. That took of well, by the way, but I must talk about it another time.
Now I am off to bed.
Take care!