My 2014

My year started with us living in Japan and has ended with us back in the UK but with plans to be somewhere completely different within the next two months. Looking back, I have made at least 117 different things during the year. More than one every three days - not bad going!

Phew! I've knitted eleven hats, two adult jumpers, four little ones and seven pairs of socks plus various other bits. I've sewn six Sew Together bags, three bed quilts and twenty four other bags or pouches. Lastly, twenty nine of the things were for me or my home - everything else was a present or for a swap.

Personally there have been a few ups and downs and there has been a lot of uncertainty about the future but as the year ends it is all looking pretty good! I don't yet have any plans for 2015, apart from setting up another new home in another new place. Hopefully this move will be slightly more permanent but then...you never know!

Magical Button Jars

My mother-in-law works in a charity shop and when I got here to her house for Christmas she resented me with a little jar full of buttons. I *love* buttons. Seeing my glee she remembered a jar she had (on the left below) and invited me to take any I liked. Squee!

Between the two jars I found some lovely ones. Terribly cute yellow on their card and a single in the sweetest shade of red.

Lovely pink with an octagonal blue.

Beautiful glass ones.

Five very small little glass triangles with diamante.

I had a lovely Christmas with the in-laws (there were 18 of us in the small house at one point) and a very nice few days before that at my Mum's with my sister and ickle niece. The poor little thing wasn't too well and was cuddled up with her Mum when she asked for a toy. She asked for my Quiet Book!

I had given it to her the day before the the pages with the moving beads from one to five and the stars on ribbon velcro'd to the page were the clear winners. I was so chuffed that she liked it enough to want it when she was poorly!

Tokyo Crafting - Guide to Shops, Classes, Events and Resources

Not intended to be exhaustive - this is just my round up of what I have come across after 13 months of living in Tokyo.

Last Updated: December 2014.

Shops

Shinjuku Craft Shops - I created a map and list of shops for a tour I did. download .doc list and descriptions and download .doc map

Nippori Fabric Town - Blogged about here. Worth going to just for Tomato which has four different buildings.

The main one has 100 Yen a metre at the entrance which is great for cheap curtains. Each floor deals with something different like knits, cosplay etc. On the fifth floor you'll find patchwork cottons in fat eighths (ish) and you can buy american imports by the half metre - everything else in the shop is by the metre. The prices are cheaper than Okadaya or Yuzawaya (both in the Shinjuku list above) but if you only need 20cm or so you're better off at the expensive shops. There are about 50 other fabric and notion shops on the same road too. Go to Nippori station and look for a down escalator at the East Exit. You should come out on a square with a big samurai on a horse statue. Look for the signs for fabric town.

Yanaka - as well as having a comic museum and an amazingly beautiful sculptor's house which is always worth visiting, and lots of cats and cat merchandise, it has a beautiful bamboo craft shop called Midoria (3 Chome-13-3 Nishinippori, Arakawa-ku). This is high end stuff so you can easily pay 15,000 for a woven vase but they also have smaller, cheaper items. Beautiful work. Few minutes walk from Nippori station, in the opposite direction to Fabric Town.

Sakura Horikiri - washi paper, fabric and paper 'painting' and kits galore in Asakusabashi. Eveything is in Japanese but the staff are very friendly and the kits are so well illustrated it is clear what you need to do just from the pictures.

Kiwa Products - beads and findings for jewellery, resin craft, bag making and probably much more. There is a small one in Shinjuku but the store in Asakusabashi is enormous - about 5 floors of lovely temptation and tonnes of instruction sheets at 50 yen a time if you lack a definite plan. There are a lot of bead shops in this area - look out for 'wholesale only' signs as they won't welcome you.

Traditional Dolls - if you are in Asakusabashi to visit either of the two above places you really have to go and at least have a quick look at the ground floor of this place. Kyugetsu is one of several of these places in the area and the dolls are just amazing, and I'm not into dolls at all. If you walk from here to Sakura Horiki you'll go past another doll making shop with all the bits and bobs needed to get started.

Salvation Army Bazaar - it might sound odd but this huge charity shop is a warehouse with different sections for clothes, books, furniture, crockery (just get everything here rather than at IKEA) and also crafts. I've blogged about it here. Only open on Saturday mornings but definitely worth a visit. Buttons are so expensive in Japan so this is a great place to get them.

100 Yen shops - beloved beauties. The biggest I've found is Daiso in Harajuku (blogged about here and in picture below).

However, you are likely to have a local Seria or Can-do near you. There are several on the Shinjuku list above. You'll be surprised (especially if you're used to nasty english pound shops) at the quality here. 100% wool yarn, fibre for needle felting, purse frames, fabric, needles, thread, buttons...you name it. Add kawaii stationery and kitchen paraphernalia and bob's your uncle.

Online craft shopping in Japan - I compiled a list of places I found out about at the Yokohama Quilt Show here. I also have a list of places selling finished handmade items in my Handmade in Japan Fes post here. Okadaya and Yuzawaya (in the Shinjuku download) also have online shops.

Classes

Pottery - Shirokane Ceramic Art School. I have done their 'try out' class in english and it was awesome. I had never made anything on a pottery wheel before and it was a great experience. Wear trousers you don;t mind getting clay on (it washes off easily). Don't expect a modern studio. It is off the main road and down a traditional little street.

Loom Weaving and/or Indigo Dyeing - both at one place, Wanariya in Asakusa. While this is a child friendly activity, don't be put off by the pictures of children on the website. I still felt like a grown up while weaving and am ridiculously proud of my coasters. You can also take your own fabric to indigo dye and they charge you by weight. About 15 mins walk from the station. Very friendly people.

Washi Paper Mini Tasters - the shop at Sakura Horikiri (above) usually has a little taster session going for some form of paper craft.

Adhoc Craft Meet-ups - meetup.com is very active in Tokyo. I can recommend Kokoro Crafts Group!


Craft Shows

Tokyo International Quilt Festival - blogged about here. Held in January every year at the Tokyo Dome which is a huge baseball stadium. This show gets seriously busy - as in no-room-to-turn-around busy. You save a couple of hundred yen and avoid the queues if you buy a ticket in advance. Not as many shopping stalls as I would expect but amazing quilts - if you can get close enough to see them!

Yokohama International Quilt Week - blogged about here.

Less than an hour from Tokyo and, in my opinion, a much better event than the Tokyo one. This is largely down to the far more manageable number of people, the excellence and variety of the displays and the numerous shopping areas. Again, you save a hundred yen or so buying in advance but the website usually has a coupon for that much you can print out and use on the day.

Handmade in Design Fes - blogged about here. A staggeringly huge event by british standards.

Design Festa Tokyo - I hear this is very good.

Other big events - keep an eye out on Time Out Tokyo for what is going on.

Resources

Stitch n Bitch Meetup - a very active group with people passing through and some 10+ year regulars. All nationalities welcome. You just promise to buy one drink minimum wherever it is, although the food at Pariya is delicious if they are there and you should try the ice cream too. There is a daytime group as well as this evening one. Both meet twice a month. I found out so much about craft shops, dealing with the recycling and more from chatting to regulars at these meetings.

Searching google in Japanese - an artform in itself. If you can't find something by googling in English, it is quite easy to do so in Japanese. The key to success is using Chrome as a broswer which auto-translates for you. Then go to translate.google.com and type in what you want to search for (i.e. glass blowing lesson ガラス吹きレッスン) and copy and paste the japanese into google.com. Each result will then have "translate this page" as a link next to it. Click on that to see what the suggested websites are saying.

Time Out Tokyo - keep an eye out for flea markets, big events, museum exhibitions and so on.

Japan Folk Craft Museum - amazing exhibitions in the most beautiful traditional building with a rotating collection of handmade items.

Bunka Gakuen Costume Museum - blogged about here. An often overlooked simple but quite large museum near Shinjuku station. They have exhibitions on all sorts of fashions.

Tokyo Crafts Gallery - This comes under the wing of the National Museum of Tokyo but is in a separate building. It is a great space and has some excellent exhibitions.

Boro-ichi Market and Happo-en Garden

As part of the farewell tour around Tokyo I knew I was not to buy anything because the suitcases are already full. Why then torture myself with a trip to Boro-ichi Market? I don't know, except that I'd had it in my diary for the last six months and nothing else planned for the morning.

The Market is called Boro-ichi because it used to be where the poorer people came to get clothes some 400+ years ago (boro being the type of kimono patched and sashiko'd many times to hold it together like what you can see on this Pinterest Board). It was also known for tool and agricultural sales and you still get several tool stalls as well as ones selling plants. What you also get it lots of everything else. If we hadn't sent our things away to the shipping company two days earlier I would have come home carrying more than the average Spanish grandmother does at harvest time. It was, though, a tad crowded.

Can you make out the vanishing point there? This place was huge and went off down other streets at right angles. I would guess perhaps 500 stalls? It could easily have been more though. There were many vintage kimono stalls.

Lots of scrabbling for the cheaper ones on the ground was going on. I saw some racks, like this one...

...of just one type of Kimono - in this case Hand Shibori Dyed Silk. They were about 2000Yen each - maybe £15? Beautiful. Kokeshi dolls were clearly not that popular since there were crates of old ones for sale all over the place.

My Japanese friend Noriko told me these ones were also rumoured to be used by noble women as...ahem...a sex toy, so possibly that's why they have apparently been cast out of family homes everywhere. I certainly wouldn't put a dildo over my fireplace but each to their own.

Baskets abounded.

Both conventional and the more modern.

Shinto shrines for home use.

Beautifully carved. Rice pounding sets with the huge bowl and hammer.

And then lots of other stuff too - new and old.

It is on again in January but only for two days and then that is it until next December - I would definitely recommend it. It was a Shoreditch vintage shop's idea of nirvana.

After all those crowds it was rather nice to arrive at a garden far away on the other side of Tokyo. Even nicer was this visit was at the prompting of Mr Pooch who had almost visited it on his first visit to Tokyo but had never quite got in. We were initially joined by a group of teenagers and a teacher but later they left and we had the place to ourselves.

Happo-en Gardens began life in the late 1600's and its name means "Garden of 8 Views" meaning it is beautiful from every angle.







I could have stayed on that bench watching the fishes for hours - if it hadn't been only 6 degrees outside!

The Gardens are also known for their collection of Bonsai, some of which are over 500 years old. It really staggers me everytime I hear about a plant that is that old.

They were are clearly the work of crafts people.


In the evening we headed off for dinner...but I'm going to save that for another day!

Final Craft Shopping

I thought I'd had my final splurge when I bought bits to finish existing projects last week. But... since I was visiting Shinjuku Gyoen Garden (yesterday's blogpost) I was so near to Yuzawaya so as to make it rude not to just pop by. There was one thing in particular I was keen to find. I had seen some decorated rotary cutters in a Japanese patchwork magazine and told myself at the time I had an Olfa yellow one and didn't need another one. But it stayed niggling in the back of my mind...

And then since I was in the shop...has anyone seen these pins with bells on in other countries? I first saw them when I took something to a local mending shop to be adjusted and was amazed. They certainly make it easier to find where you need to sew when you're dealing with a lot of fabric, plus one in a pincushion is just going to sound lovely when you are using the others around it. And then they just happened to have half price metal purse frames.

The circles at the bottom are the binder rings I'm going to use to bind the quiet book I made last week. I'll just need to check how easily Jasmine can open them. They are quite stiff for a toddler though. And then of course I had to walk past the button section to get to the tills.

The red riding hood and puss in boots ones were too cute to ignore. My sister loves monkeys so those will make their way onto something for Jasmine next year. The others are MINE ALL MINE. Jeez I love buttons. I'll be happy to be reunited with my full collection back in England! Oh and of course my family and friends...!

Farewell to Shinjuku Gyoen Garden

I first saw this garden on 1st December last year. This year I was 10 days later and initially I thought I'd missed all the beautiful autumn foliage.

Not that bare trees don't have their own kind of beauty, but I wasn't in the mood for a Tim Burton kind of stroll.

I consoled myself that there were still the lakes to look at and headed off for the 'Japanese Garden' (which does make sense in a Japanese park because some of it was formal french - whatever that is - and so on). It turns out they'd kept a little bit of the autumn colours for me.

There is also a huge greenhouse on site. It's so humid inside there are lots of signs about dripping condensation falling on you.

They had a special display of orchids.

These unfailingly remind me of the singing flower scene in the proper Alice in Wonderland film. I adore that film and that scene in particular.

Definitely a bossy woman in a bonnet telling someone off (probably me)!

The gardens in Japan have been such an amazing resource and I wish I'd got into exploring them earlier last Spring. I told myself in the summer that I'd be able to go back to them in 2015 but that was when we thought we'd be here til May so now I won't have that chance. Here we are just a week from leaving and there is still a fair bit to get done. But then we may come back here to live one day. Pooch loves it here and if it weren't for the language barrier I would too. I just need to start learning it now, then I'll be ready in about ten years or so!

More Finished Objects

These are a combination of more christmas presents and some of that stress induced creativity I posted about a few days ago.

My final make for my niece is these Meg and Mog dolls. I was surprised not to be able to find a pattern for them already out there so maybe I'll share mine when I once again have a scanner. My one went on Sunday. The closest I found was a knitted Mog on Ravelry but I wanted to sew these.

I used a thin blanket fleece kind of thing in black and white and then some yellow felt for the eyes and shoe buckles. Where suitable, the sections are lightly stuffed to make them huggable. I've also got her a set of books in a bag and she already adores the first book so hopefully these will go down well.

I have also finished the Clapotis and hat for our Japanese husband and wife friends

The hat is another Luuk one, linked in my previous post. The Clapotis is, I think, my third and I had forgotten how boring they were to knit. I remember the novelty of dropping stitches on my first one but this one was a bit of a slog! These are joined by a pair of Mojo socks for a different recipient. The balls of stripey blue were 30g (common in Japan) so I needed a little additional yarn for the toe - bring on a bright yellow remnant!

I have another pair in shades of white/beige (so also have yellow toes) on the needles. Then this one actually needs the button to be sewn on but is a small cowl.

Finally, this is something where I bought the bundle of plastic flowers about six months ago because they were so bright and cheerful, and decided to add them to a hair barette about 3 months after that. It's taken our leaving for me to finally get the glue gun in gear.

Not exactly seasonal, but very cheering! And it's good to have a bit of a cheer when you've no kind of chairs to sit on, or tables to sit at, and spend your days maniacally crafting between bouts of dividing possessions between five boxes. Rubbish and charity (both unlimited), suitcase (extremely limited), air freight (very limited and will take 2-3 weeks to appear in London) and sea freight (limited and will take 2-3 months to appear in London). I am maintaining my sanity by crafting (maniacally) and watching Muppets Christmas Carol. Watched it three times already. I sing along. Maniacally.