Work in Progress

I have been working away on some childrens’ tote bags for my dear Kompadres K & L.  They asked me to make bags as the graduation presents for their students – adorable little munchkins 4 and 5 years old in an all-English preschool and daycare program – and I was happy to help out.

I spent the weekend cutting my fabric and felt appliques, and hopefully I will be able to get these finished in near-record time.  I’m already behind!

Beanbags

Yes, I do sometimes actually finish projects.  Look!  Finished beanbags!  These bad boys were sitting in a basket next to the couch for a couple of months.  They were stitched up on three sides, turned, stuffed, and pinned on the final side.  All I had to was slip stitch the final side shut.  Yes, it took me way too long.  I assure you I am properly hanging my head in shame.

But check them out!  Six colors, two of each color, and super-light.  You can throw these things around in the house and not damage anything.  You can get hit in the face with one (although I don’t exactly recommend it) and it doesn’t hurt. I created these for friends of ours down in Imabari who teach English to kids in their house.  The last thing they need are beanbags that can really cause some damage.

And although I haven’t tested them yet, I’m pretty sure these things will be machine washable.  Now that is what I like to call a crafting coup d’état.

Straps

So this weekend I got started digging through the piles of unfinished projects stacked all over my apartment.  Trust me, there are a lot of them.  I grabbed the nearest thing that needed to be worked on, and ended up with some finished hot pink straps for children’s tote bags.  Woo-hoo!  Straps for five tote bags done.  May not seem like much of an accomplishment, but the straps are one of the parts I dislike the most.  So much ironing.  And I do NOT like ironing!  But once the straps are done, the tote bags tend to come together quite quickly.  Especially since the appliques for the bags are already done and sitting in another pile of unfinished project pieces.

Then I found this pile under some felt:

Um, yeeaaahhhh.  Kinda wishing I had left the felt where it was.  Out of sight, out of mind, right?  But now this big pile ‘o mess is parked on my ironing board glaring at me.  Judging me.  “You should have finished this long ago!  We will haunt your waking hours until you finish this most dreaded component of the project!  Aarrrrrrrrggg!!!”  Yeah, those strips of fabric are half-pirate.  Half-pirate and half-Jabba the Hut.  The fabric equivalent of a tell-tale heart.  Gah!

I’m still here, I swear.

Betcha thought I ran away, huh?  I didn’t.  Other parts of life have just managed to weasel their way onto the priority list above blogging.  Mr. Kaizer has moved to the States for a project, so I have been on my own in Tokyo since the end of August.  (We have done the different country thing for months at a time before, and while it’s not our favorite way to do things, we handle it pretty well.)  Not only have I had to adjust to living alone for the first time ever, I don’t have my sweet, lovable Mr. Kaizer to help me out during the week.  Not only do I have to do my own ironing now (which I detest), I had to give myself a crash-course in cooking.  Still haven’t starved, so I think I’m doing ok.  Add to that some major paradigm shifts in my day-job industry, new projects to try and increase the company’s competitiveness in the market, and my immediate superior taking time off which allows me an opportunity to prove to the higher-ups that I can/should be promoted at some point, and I have barely had time to even think about blogging, let alone actually sitting down to do it.

But I feel like I’m losing my mind.  As my mom reminded me, if I don’t make time for myself there never will be any time.  So, I’m making time.  For the last couple of nights I have done nothing but watch movies and unpick dozens of yards of machine stitching.  My seam ripper is my new best buddy.  After so many quality hours together, I really feel it deserves a name, but nothing comes to mind.  Perhaps one day I’ll come up with something.

“But Miss Kaizer, what on earth were you completely ripping apart?” you ask.  Well, there is a project I started last winter that I didn’t finish.  Not very surprising, honestly.  (My ability to procrastinate is legendary.)  Mr. Kaizer had an idea for my first quilt that I absolutely loved.  Using only traditional Japanese prints, make a nine-foot square blanket out of one-foot square blocks arranged in a pattern that is completely symmetrical along any central axis.  We got the fabric, cut it, and stitched it together.

The only problem was that we didn’t have a quilting ruler when cutting the pieces, and the cutting mat was metric while the ruler was using imperial measurements.  Had disaster written all over it, honestly.  But I assembled the top, hoping the piecing errors would be slight enough for me to live with them.  Some of the corners were absolute perfection.  Others were, for lack of a better term, a hot mess.  All I could see when I looked at this quilt top were the errors.  So I had to pick the entire thing apart.  I will be trimming all the blocks to make sure they’re the same size before I start to slowly and meticulously assemble the pieces this time.

Until next time, may life continue to inspire you!

Miss Kaizer

A Big Giant Rectangle

So I hadn’t realized it had been so long since my last post.  But then I got an email from my mother which basically said “I have regularly been checking your blog, so you should at least regularly update the thing.”  Of course, it was thinly veiled with concern for my personal well-being and interest in what I have been doing, but the message came across pretty clear nonetheless.

What I have I been up to?  Aside from attempting to create some semblance of order in the crafty/sewing storage arena (an attempt which is failing horribly, by the way), I just finished up a commission.  A dear kompadre of ours, S, is an artist who does video installations for parties and events all over Tokyo.  Normally the video is projected directly onto a plain white wall, or the event is taking place in a venue accustomed to hosting VJs (meaning the site has huge projector screens already).  But the location for the next installation doesn’t have either of these things (or doesn’t have them in the proper dimensions).  So S called me up one day and asked if I could make him a solid white backdrop, three meters wide and two meters tall, that didn’t “look as if it was made from a bed sheet and tape on a bedroom floor.”  No problem at all.

Mr. Kaizer and I went to the fabric district and found extra wide fabric in the fourth store we visited – to be fair, the first store was nothing but trim, all of it 100 yen (about $1) per meter.  I was distracted by this like a magpie is distracted by a nickel.  Couldn’t help myself.  And the second store was nothing but remnants of adorable Japanese fabrics.  But once I got the initial “ooh, I love the fabric district” jitters out of my system, it took us almost no time at all to find what we were looking for.  I found heavy white cotton fabric that was 228 cm wide (just over 2.25 meters) for an extremely reasonable price.

The difficult part of the whole thing was hemming the edges of a two meter by three meter rectangle in a space that isn’t large enough to lay the whole thing out and make sure the edges are straight (I live in Japan – my apartment is a shoebox).  But it turned out extremely well and it was actually easier than I expected.  Really, the only challenge was the sheer size of the finished project.  Other than that, it was just a big giant rectangle.

Until next time, may life continue to inspire you!

Miss Kaizer

Felt Flurry

Yesterday I promised to let you know what I had accomplished over the weekend.  But here’s the kicker – I remembered and I’m actually doing it.  Yay for small victories!

All I can say about the weekend is that it was a flurry of felt for me.  I was working away on appliques for the childrens’ tote bags (for Ueda Joint) and got quite a lot accomplished.  Before I show you pictures, though, I have to apologize.  Mr. Kaizer took off to Osaka this morning and took the camera with him, leaving me the little digital point and shoot.  It’s still a good camera, but it was just plain dark when I took these shots.  There’s only so much mixed indoor lighting and a little flash can do for the subject of a photo – after that it’s just a terrible shot.  So, I’m sorry for the dark, far from stellar photos of the appliques.  I promise to post better pictures when I can.

First, I finished up the last little bits of embroidery on the Hello Kitties.  The eyes and nose are outlined in a backstitch with a satin stitch filling in the eyes.  I have started making the bows out of ribbon, but those are best added after the kitty has been machine stitched onto the outside of the bag.  Although only two are pictured here, I actually made 12 of these things.  I had made some of these before, so there were no surprises.

Now I wanted to make some more of the dinosaurs, but Yuzawaya stores all over Tokyo were out of the fabric.  I had to find something new, and I finally settled on this cute frog fabric.  The winking frog was the one I liked most, so I decided to make him into the applique for this particular bag.  He is about the same size as the Hello Kitty.  Instead of embroidering everything on this one, though, I got smart and cut out felt.  Much easier.  And easier is good, since I made 16 of these.  Yep.  Sixteen. Yowza.  I found out a lot about cutting very thin strips of felt while working on these guys.  Specifically, I learned that it’s tedious and I don’t like doing it.  But then I considered the amount of time each one would have taken to individually embroider and I realize my decision was probably for the best.

Only two more appliques to make, and I will be working on those this weekend.  Hopefully then I’ll be finished with the felt for a while.

May life continue to inspire you,

Miss Kaizer

Kompadre Krafting

This weekend was a whirlwind of crafting activity (from which I am just now recovering), and I was joined in my adventures by my lovely creative kompadre, L.  Mr. Kaizer was gone for most of Sunday afternoon, so L and I were able to spread out in the dining room and get down to business with some serious cutting and sewing.  L and her boyfriend K (the charming duo with the silk screening setup) will be sharing a booth with us at Ueda Joint.  Aside from producing some stellar t-shirts for the event, L had some great ideas for accessories – you’ll have to wait if you want to hear more about the specifics of what she’s creating.

I do have to show you a little bit, though.  I mean, look at the colors she is using.  They’re fantastic.  Plus, she is using ricrac.  Is it possible that a project with ricrac in it won’t turn out well?  I doubt it.

The thing that really gets me, though is that she found all her wonderful fabrics at Yuzawaya.  It’s the same store I go to.  It’s not the same branch, but the idea with national chains is that you can find the same things at any location.  That’s kind of how they work.  But the thing is, I’ve either never seen the fabrics she is using, or I’ve seen them but walked right past them.  It really is remarkable how easily we can get sucked in to routine in a store and stop seeing the boundless possibilities behind everything.  At what point did I stop looking upon the contents of Yuzawaya as a source of inspiration and start to view it as an obstacle course to be navigated while in pursuit of one specific item?

I think there is only one solution to this: I must return to Yuzawaya when I do not have a specific project I am working on and just spend half a day wandering around.  The difficulty, of course, comes from trying to find a time when I have half a day to kill and no projects in the works.

Getting to see all of L’s goodies did remind me of a wise decision I had made many months ago – avoid the ribbon and trim section of the store.  When it comes to things this lovely I have absolutely zero self control.  L wisely kept her marvelous ribbons and laces out of sight, but I did manage to ogle this ribbon as it was being sewn onto a piece of fabric during the early stages of product assembly.  Absolutely wonderful.

Tomorrow I should have pictures of my own progress to share with you.  Until then:

May life continue to inspire you,

Miss Kaizer

Progress!

I don’t intentionally write a bunch of posts all at once.  Sometimes it just kind of happens that way.  I am trying to do a bit of crafting every day with fairly regular blog posts, but some days I’m just so darn tired that I don’t have the energy to do anything except convert oxygen into carbon dioxide.  You see, I also work.  A lot.  Like 60 hours a week a lot.  So sometimes there will be a few days without any posts and others there will be multiple posts – I do what I can, when I can.  Fair warning!

So this picture has been languishing on my hard drive for about five days now.  As you can see, we’ve been making serious progress with inventory for Ueda Joint!  Since this picture was taken the stack has nearly doubled in size. We now have the exteriors of 185 aroma healing pillows just waiting for their insides.  I’ll be sure to post more pictures as progress is made.

After all that machine sewing in one sitting, I felt an overwhelming urge to do some hand sewing.  So I made a little felt dinosaur applique.  Isn’t he cute?  I might need to make a few more of these guys…

May life continue to inspire you,

Miss Kaizer

Oodles of Supplies

On Thursday Mr. Kaizer and I went shopping for supplies at Yuzawaya, the seven-floor Tokyo crafting mecca.  Ueda Joint, a weekend long jazz festival in the Nagano area,  is coming up at the end of the month and we’re going to have a booth.  So it’s in to super-sewing mode for the aroma healing pillows, children’s tote bags, appliques, and a few other items that I will reveal later.  While I’m in the office, Mr. Kaizer has been cutting all the fabric for me between his conference calls.  Such a fantastic guy!

So, what lovely things did we acquire on our trip?  I thought you’d never ask!

For the tote bags:

I’m using the adorable Hello Kitty fabric again.  It’s just too cute to not use it.  I wanted to get some more of the dinosaur fabric, but they were all out.  I have to start checking other Yuzawaya branches to see if I can find some more.  But we also got Shinkansen (bullet train) fabric for the boys with a bright green contrasting fabric.  I plan to make a cute little train applique for it as well.  For my second girls fabric I got multicolored polka-dots on grey (as suggested by Miss Tanya – thanks Tanya!).  I couldn’t decide which of the contrasting fabrics looked best with the polka-dots, so I’m going to do some of each.  I’ve already made a panda applique to go on this one.  I mean, who doesn’t like pandas?

For the aroma healing pillows:

We got a wide variety of colors in the traditional Japanese asa no ha fabric.  It’s a stylized interpretation of the hemp leaf that was popular in the Edo Period (1603-1868).  It was most often used for baby blankets and clothing for children so they could grow up fast and strong like the hemp plant.

We also picked up some nice purple linen with polkadots, clover and ladybugs, and some checkered cotton with little country girls on it.  They remind me of characters from a Ghibli movie, but when I said so Mr. Kaizer he shook his head like I was nuts.

The floral fabrics we picked up are extremely soft.  We think all of these fabrics will do very well at the festival.  Right now, I cant’ stop touching them.  I love fabric!

Other goodies:

Most expats in Japan are working here as English teachers.  (Ok, I should clarify that most expats from English speaking countries are working here as teachers.  And that isn’t a statistic or anything, it’s my guess.)  I first taught English when I came here and many of the Kaizer Kompadres are English teachers.  They’re actually very good English teachers, and provide a quality learning experience for the children in their classes.

Where is this going, you ask?  Well, I have been asked to make bean bags.  Gloriously multicolored, differently shaped, fun for tossing, learning colors, and learning shapes beanbags.  You may be thinking that beanbags aren’t that big of a deal.  But guess what?  It’s my first commissioned project! I’ve been hired to make something for someone else.  Happy dance…happy dance…happy dance…  Ok, I’m done.  But look at those colors.  They’re fantastic.

Of course, I had to get the thread to go along with all this new fabric.  Reminds me of a box of crayons.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some SERIOUS sewing to do!

May life continue to inspire you,

Miss Kaizer

Finishing things I start…

Pay no attention to the stray thread. I have trimmed it since this photo was taken.

I have a bit of a problem finishing things I start sometimes.  Ok, a lot of the time.  I start a project but never quite finish it.  Like most crafters I have stacks of partially finished projects all over the house, and I feel pangs of guilt every time my gaze lingers on one of them.  But not tonight!

No, today was a slow day at work and I was able to leave nearly half an hour early.  Today was one of those rare days when I got to leave while the sun was still up.  The light wasn’t there long, but it did a pretty good job of cheering me up.  So I finished a few stray projects that have been nagging me for days, weeks, and months.

“Months?” you say.  Yes, months.  I’m actually so terribly embarrassed about how long it took me to complete this one that I’m not even going to tell you the craft blog charity cause for which they were intended.  But now that they are finished they will still be shipped off to the same country that would have been receiving them before.  I will put my faith in the crafty lady who organized this whole charity drive and just ask her to send them to whichever charity she thinks could use them the most.

Anyway, it feels really really good to have these completed.  And I’m very pleased with how they turned out.  I made everything – the straps, the appliques, all of it.  Completing the project was sufficient for giving me warm fuzzy feelings inside.  But knowing they’re going to charity makes me feel even better.

Six of each.

Please ignore the kitchen shelves, the fridge, and the ironing board in the background.  I do live in Tokyo and apartments are small.  The dining room table is really the only place large enough for crafting.

May life continue to inspire you,

Miss Kaizer