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

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!

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

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

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

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