Giveaway!

Photo courtesy Craft: blog.

This giveaway is now closed.

Ok, Kaizer Peeps, it’s time for my first giveaway!

You may have seen the post over on the Craft: blog about the Lego paper punch being sold by Muji.  The paper punch that is only being sold in Japan.  Well, guess what?  It is extremely popular here, too.  They cannot keep them in stores.  They have sold out twice already and won’t have any new ones available until Christmas Eve.  But guess what, kiddies?  I have two of them on the way to my front door!  And I’m giving both of them away.

What do you have to do to enter the drawing?  Just leave a comment!  Comments will close at noon (Tokyo time) on December 24, at which time I will be randomly selecting the two winners.  Oh, and I will be adding a couple of extra surprise goodies in with the paper punch.

Good luck, and may life continue to inspire you!

Miss Kaizer

Patient Zero

That’s my new nickname in the office.  Patient Zero.  I very suddenly started feeling ill just over a week ago, assumed I had come down with a nasty cold, and just got on with life.  Well, two other guys I work with got the same thing.  One fell ill on Friday and the other yesterday.  Both of them went to the doctor and were promptly diagnosed with swine flu.

Yep.  Everyone in the office blames me.  I’m like the kid on the playground with cooties.

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

Woo-hoo!

There was a link to my page on the onewhirleddesign twitter feed!  You know what this means, right?  People are actually reading my blog.  Oh, that gives me all kinds of warm-fuzzies!

Onewhirleddesign features all kinds of cool blogs on her feed.  Additionally, she has some beautifully crafted items on her Etsy page.

Sunday at Ueda Joint

I know I promised this post several days ago, but with earthquakes, typhoons, train delays, busy markets, and regional strategy meetings I was a bit more busy this week than I anticipated.  Sorry!  You may have noticed that Tokyo experienced three large earthquakes in just a few days.  The first one I didn’t feel at all because I was on a train.  The second quake ripped me out of a sound sleep at 5 am – I was not happy.  And the third one hit while I was at work.  My office is on the 9th floor of our building.  Making buildings that can withstand earthquakes means making buildings that sway when a quake hits – if the building is rigid, the shaking will cause structural damage, sometimes to the p0int of building collapse. So riding out a good-sized earthquake while on the 9th floor is definitely…interesting.  I have been in many earthquakes before, both in Japan and in the US, but that was one of the more unsettling experiences.  Anyway, on to the post I promised!

So on Sunday we realized that the festival wasn’t going well for us and that we should try to have some fun  instead of stressing out about things.  We packed up the shop and just enjoyed ourselves.  I mean, it was a festival at a castle.  Does it get much better than that?

Ueda castle was built in 1583 – when you think about what it means for something to be “old” in the US and then compare it to something like this you realize we have very little concept of what it means when a building is old.  There were some battles and some politics, which you can read about here, but the long and the short of it is that it was razed to the ground and rebuilt in 1622.  Most of the walls and towers of the castle visible today are from 1622.  Why is this significant, you ask?  Well, a lot of historical sites are reconstructions of castles and homes that were destroyed at one point or another and rebuilt in modern times.  Ueda Castle isn’t one of those sites.

Tepee stage with castle tower in the background.

The largest stage.

There were three stages at the festival – two of them inside the original walls behind the gate in the picture.  One of them was set up inside a tepee.  Seriously.  The other one was small and hosted mostly DJs for the weekend.  The third and largest was at the base of the castle wall.  You can’t see it in the picture of the entrance, but the castle is at the top of a hill.  To the left of the gate things drop off pretty steeply to a grassy field where the largest stage was set up.  People wandered freely from stage to stage as the performers changed, stopping at booths to shop and snack along the way.  Shop owners from all over the Nagano area and Tokyo set up booths offering handcrafted items made of organic materials.  A lot of the food was organic, most of it was locally grown.

Several artists were also creating new works during the weekend on enormous canvases set up along the major pathways around the castle.  It was actually really interesting to watch them as they worked.  I have never really been able to draw or do anything freehand like this, so watching someone fearlessly take a brush to canvas simply boggles the mind.  The second painting was definitely our favorite – a pagoda, a train, a Buddha, and a taiko drummer – fantastic.  Interesting fact for you – the hotel room we stayed in had a Bible by the bed.  It wasn’t placed by the Gideons, but it was there nonetheless.  It was right next to a book on Buddhist teachings.  Definitely made me smile.

I also saw some unbelievable crochet while I was there.  The first was a free-form wall hanging made of countless different yarns – forgive the poor photo, I took it in their booth which had a red awning.  The girls running this booth run a boutique in an area of Tokyo known for its bohemian style – it also happens to be an area of Tokyo very near the Kaizer Kasa.  One of the girls does all the crochet and she makes some of the most adorable hats, bags, and headbands I’ve ever seen.  I have always been really impressed by crochet, mostly because it is the only medium I have tried but have not really been able to get the hang of.  I think it’s because it’s a little too free-form for me.  I do better with a bit of structure, and having a large piece of crocheted cloth with only a tiny little hook in it just never seems to work out well.  Knitting, on the other hand, has the additional structure I need to really feel confident in myself.  Speaking of confidence, I would never have the guts to wear something as outrageous as the crocheted vest I saw on one of the festival-goers.  (When it comes to my clothing I am depressingly conservative and spend most of my time wishing I could be more daring.)  I spotted her in the crowd and immediately pulled out my camera, but I was only able to get one shot before she disappeared.  It was by far the best summer crochet/knit project I saw all weekend and perhaps the best one I have ever seen, period.

When it was all said and done, Ueda Joint would be a fun festival to attend again in the future, but I don’t think we’ll be having a booth again for a long while.

May life continue to inspire you,

Miss Kaizer

I’m back!

Betcha thought I was never coming back, huh?  Well, I did come back and first thing’s first – where the heck have I been, young lady?  (I know that’s what you’re thinking.)

Two words: Ueda Joint.  I have been talking about this music festival since just after the birth of my blog.  About three weeks ago we really hit crunch-time for production and the blogging fell to the very  bottom of the priority list.  Mr. Kaizer was cutting and ironing all day while I was in the office, and when I got home at 7 pm or later I would stay up until 1-2 am stitching my little heart out, only to wake up again at 5 am the next morning.  This continued for two weeks.  The coffee machine and I were the best of friends.

Despite all this effort, we fell short of our production goals (admittedly, they were quite lofty), but we still had more than enough product in inventory.  How did it go, you ask?  Well, let me just say this: hippies with limited fiscal resources make delightful friends.  They make terrible paying customers.

All the people were extremely friendly and we had more than one person comment on the quality of our handmade items.  Huge stroke to the ego on that one.  But ya know what popped it like a bubble?  Losing money on the endeavor overall.  But as Mr. Kaizer and I like to say, it was a learning experience and those are invaluable.  (Lather, rinse, repeat.  I lost track of the number of times I had to say it until I started to feel better.)

The festival itself (held July 31 – August 2), according to the other vendors we spoke with, didn’t have nearly the attendance it had last year.  Nor was the weather particularly cooperative.  It bucketed down rain Friday and Saturday afternoon.  Sunday was a pretty constant intermittent drizzle.  We actually lost a bit of inventory to the unexpected downpour on Friday.  By the end of the day Saturday we pretty much expected that everything we owned would have at least a bit of mud on it.

All in all, it was a positive weekend, even if it didn’t feel that way at the time.  But once I finish scraping mud off of everything, I plan to start listing items in my Etsy shop.  And now that the festival has passed, I should have enough time to blog more regularly again – tomorrow I will be sharing with you our Sunday Ueda Joint experience.  See?  Every cloud does have a silver lining!

Imabari

I had every intention, dear Kaizer Peeps, of posting about appliques and other bits of sewing miscellanea.  But there are more than a few colorful expressions my dad has for intentions, opinions, and the like, so I won’t bore you with what I intended to do.  (And I’ll spare you the gritty details on said expressions.)  The long and the short of it is this – I got out of town over the long weekend!

Mr. Kaizer and I headed down to Imabari in Ehime prefecture on the island of Shikoku to visit some friends.  (If I were a more clever blogger, and if it wasn’t currently past 11 pm, I would insert a fancy-shmancy link to a Google Map.  But no such luck today.)  Our friends live very near the ocean in this lovely town rich in maritime history.  It also has a castle.  And who doesn’t love a castle?  (This particular castle had historic samurai suits of armor.  Totally cool, but I know that if one of those guys came running at me with a sword that I would probably definitely make a stinky mess in my lil’ ‘ol panties…but I digress.)

Despite the awesomeness of the castle, we were there to visit our delightful Kaizer Kompadres – the castle was just a bonus.  M & Y used to live in our neighborhood in Tokyo before moving to Imabari nearly one year ago.  But the terrible part was that we hadn’t seen them since they moved.  *sniffle!

We had fun visiting historic sites and all, but the best part of the vacation was definitely spending time with M & Y.  They’re wonderful people!

Can’t wait to see them again soon!

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