Blythe Dolls in Tokyo

Have you heard of these dolls? They tend to be a bit like marmite - for non-british readers that means you either love or hate them. Here are just a few photos of Flickr of some. Lots more here.

Meanwhile on Etsy you can imagine all the accessories and actual dolls you can buy. I just saw a doll on there for £850. People take these things really seriously.

Personally I am not bothered by them. I can admire the artistry without wanting to get involved. That doesn't mean I wasn't intrigued though when I saw giant ones in a shop window in central Tokyo.

They were there to advertise Bottega Veneta handbags so the only items of relevance to the advertising part of this were the bags the dolls are holding.

As a spectacle though, you'd have to agree it is very eye catching.

There were a lot of excited, young, japanese women taking photos.

The shop was the Isetan in Shinjuku (the equivalent of London's Selfridges), the same one I mentioned in my last window display post. Meanwhile, in the slightly more downmarket Uniqlo, there were these:

These furry guys were in the middle of the shop with their own tie-in t-shirt display for a new film which was being trailed on the monitors.

Naturally I have no idea what the film is but if these guys are anything to go by it is possibly my kind of thing!

Indigo Dyeing in Asakusa

I had long wanted to try this so when I saw it as an activity on Meet-up.com I was all in. I met a group of 16 others in Asakusa and the organiser took us along many back streets until we arrived at Wanariya - which I have since found has a really good english website. It was a bit like the 'paint your own pottery' places I've been to in London where you choose an item, decorate it and then they bake it for you. Here we could choose from t-shirts, bags or simple cloths and there were lots of examples around to inspire you.

I chose a rectangular cloth. We had a little lecture in english and japanese to start all about the history of indigo and its manufacture and then we were off. The teacher was suitably dressed with encouragingly blue tinted hands.

I was quite disappointed that we could only try the tie-dye technique since that was a bit 1988 for me but, as they say over here, "comme ci, comme ca".

My cloth ended up looking like an unpainted lab model of an STD.

In retrospect this wasn't a great idea as I was just going to end up with big white splodges, but I was mainly in it for the dye so didn't think about it at the time. We were kitted out with plastic shoe protectors, smocks, clear plastic gloves and then blue elbow length gloves over those.

Basically - that dye wasn't going anywhere near your person unless you went in head first. The vats were capable of taking a whole person since they were these metal oil drums. So much liquid!

You only need 60 seconds in one to get the full colour so the deed was done and then you get it out, squeeze out the excess and wait for the blue to arrive.

You can see in the photo above that mine, at the top, was already dark blue while the green one at the bottom was only just out of the vat so not yet developed. It was pretty cool to watch it change. More rinsing and a quick spin...

...and it was time to try and get those elastic bands off.

And this is how they all turned out.

Pretty cool huh? See me - just to the right of centre holding my white blobby cloth? Ah well, lesson learnt.

The eagle eyed among you will have noticed the looms in the background of the teacher photo.

Turns out this place does traditional weaving too and so while I was there I booked in for a weaving lesson. Only the most basic one - making two coasters - but I've always wanted to try so am very excited!

Big Top

This is the biggest quilt top I have ever made. It measures 70"x100" which is roughly 1.7m x 2.5m.

I have no idea what to do with it. It seems silly to quilt it while I am here as then I'll need to transport the bulkier finished version of it back home again. So I have decided to leave it like this and decide what to do with it whenever I arrive back in the UK.

Patchwork Distractions

There are various ups and downs here at present so to distract myself I have been going gung ho on this big'un.

 

That is a double mattress on its side that it is draped over, so you can tell that it is quite wide. And it was when I draped it there that I realised I had perhaps overestimated the number of blocks required.

I have always liked zig zag quilts but loath patchwork with triangles so loved this idea of working on the diagonal when I came across it on Pinterest. I was trying to think when I cut out the pieces, since this is a project I brought with me from the UK, at which time only about half the colour/white squares were sewn and trimmed to size. It turns out it was a year ago exactly give or take a couple of weeks. I linked to the tutorial in that post.

 

I can still remember making the colour piles out of all my fat quarters and looking at them against the green carpet. It would be clean only for a minute or two after I'd finished hoovering and then all the bits of thread would start accumulating again. I've been thinking about that flat a lot recently. I really liked it and felt very at home there. I recently downloaded a 'Home Sweet Home' pattern to make for a friend. It all makes you think.

A History of Pooch, the World Cup and Me

Pooch is a football fanatic. By day he supports Manchester United, but on special occasions he supports England. Pooch and I met in 2004 and by our first World Cup as a couple (2006) we were living together in relative harmony. I was blogging back then and graphed the amount of time the two of us spent together each day when not sleeping during that period.

In 2010 we were in Istanbul on holiday for much of it, and I had got used to Pooch's obsession, helped by the beauty of the city.

In 2014, after a divorce and getting remarried, we are in Tokyo so have missed any UK build up there might have been although I understand that had been quite low key. However, Pooch's passion is not diminished and his preparations have been single minded. This saw both of us in a seedy sports bar in Roppongi - an area of Tokyo kind of like Soho in the 80s - at 7am the day of the first England game. The key difference to previous occasions we had watched a match together was that in this bar a lot of people had clearly been there all night and a lot were clearly asleep.

They woke up when England appeared to score in the first five minutes and Pooch let out a roar like an attacking Wampa (Star Wars reference). Sadly England lost the game, and the following one, and are now out of the World Cup.

The point, however, is that at some point during these tournaments Pooch feels mildly guilty about the amount of time he is spending on football and the subsequent neglect of his wife and tries to make amends by offering to do something he wouldn't normally. This time it was going to a Cat Cafe. Pooch always says he is allergic to cats so I had expected him to sit in a corner and look grumpy, but to be fair he sat down next to a cat and was straight in there.

Then he saw Bruiser. I had of course told him about him (Pooch about Bruiser, not vice versa) and those of you with good memories will remember that Bruiser hates everyone and everything. Here he is on a previous visit.

Pooch immediately felt a connection to an animal his true equal in grumpiness.

Naturally Bruiser resented the affection and took a swipe at him. This did not deter Pooch who spent the rest of our time there talking to and occasionally risking a stroke of Bruiser's crazily thick fur. When we left he then proposed an amendment to our agreement to get a cat once we own our own home (an agreement that has been tortuously arrived at over 10 years) - that when we do get a cat it should be a grumpy one like Bruiser. To round off the outing we then went to a Japanese ice cream shop I've eyed up on previous visits to Ebisu. Partly because you can get ice cream that looks like a bear.

Neither of us went for the bear in the end but we did get some amazing flavours like melon, water melon, brown sugar, tomato, macha and milk. The texture was less creamy than english ice cream and slightly more like a granita, but still extremely delicious. The day was hot and humid so the melon in particular was very refreshing!

To finish, some of you may have noticed the new blog design.

My previous effort failed magnificently when the header I'd created was too short which left me with that odd pale plue design for ages. I much prefer this one. Let me know what you think!

Edit: Pooch complained at my using pictures of him on my blog despite having been fine with this on many other occasions. I've therefore removed his face from the photos.

Finally Found What I'm Looking For

You would have thought that a city the size of Tokyo would have a patchwork shop. Fabric shops, of which there are many, are good but they aren't the same. They lack the precuts, the notions, the patterns, the knowledge. I spent a morning trying to track down one called Palette last week but to no avail. I widened my search and came across Quilt Party in Chiba.

Image from here on Wikipedia.
Tokyo is area 13 and Chiba is 12, so to get from central Tokyo to central Chiba you have to go all the way around the top of the bay, which takes about 70 minutes on public transport. My point being, this is not my local shop, but was definitely worth the trip! Sadly photos were a no no but look at my haul. First the 'american' fabrics - by which I mean ones I've seen available outside Japan.

Then we have modern japanese fabrics:

And finally the traditional japanese fabrics - these are the ones I specifically went for and that I have seen so much of in quilt magazines and books here.

I had a go at a colour circle.

I love these colours. They are so different from what you get in the UK and elsewhere. I was trying to describe the palette to Noriko, who is pukka Japanese but not a quilter, but knew as soon as I used the word 'murky' that I'd failed. I have in mind a dresden quilt but I am just enjoying looking at them at the moment.

Meanwhile in my more usual colour palette I have finally got the handles attached to this bag.

I finished the patchwork (which is on both sides) aaaaaages ago but had been balking at attaching the lining and handles in such a way as to not cock up either. This is my first time using these solid wood handles (I got these secondhand at the Salvation Army Bazaar a month or so ago) and it took a long time for my brain to work it all out to my satisfaction.

While I was enjoying my moment I realised I'd forgotten to add an inside pocket - but I decided not to cry about it. The lining is these two sashiko-ish placemats I also found at the Sally Army.

I have two more hexagon projects that need finishing but these are much smaller.

My next project awaits though and will use my final purchase from Quilt Party.

This is a completely new shape for me. I tackled clamshells earlier in the year and made my camera pouch from them. I haven't yet decided what the applecores will become but I am sure that something will present itself in due course.

A Spot of Making

The two Sew Together bags I blogged about last week are now finished.

The buttons disguise where my patchwork came out just a teeny bit short and didn't meet the binding.

Not that it takes much to prompt me to add a button to something. The velvet one is a present.

She's going on holiday at the weekend so I thought it might come in handy.

I'm not sure what to use mine for yet.

I deliberately used colours outside my usual palette but while I'm very happy with it, it is a little more butch than I'd usually go for. I think it's the black.

I also found a moment to spit out another frame bag so I could recheck the process for my workshop next month.

The organiser is thrilled and I am pretty happy with it.

Lastly, this is what I am most proud of this week:

I know Rachel is also sprouting and in fact is a week or so ahead of me. Things 'growing' is something that has always fascinated me. Babies to adults, crystals in jars, tomatoes - it is all as one in the part of my mind labelled "wow". I am fully aware of all the science behind it but still....wow. That one was only about a day old and had gone from this in that time:

Can you see it? Where the yellow flower had just dropped off and there's a tiny little bump? Amazing. I mean - cells, water, nutrition, but still...so cool.