creative problem solving

Here we are in May, and in Japan, the middle of "Golden Week".

With a number of holidays falling here and there, mixed with weekends, it makes one long week of days off from work and school.

Of course, when all help is on holiday, it is not a very good week to have problems.

The first problem was my wi-fi.
Suddenly, with no warning, all connections were shut off.
This caused for a very quiet week because my telephone line is also connected to that server.

I was able to get in touch with daughter Norie and she called the server to find out I will have to re-apply and wait anywhere from a week to a month or two.

I can see some of my e-mail on my cell phone but many of those I can not open and it is not very handy to text on that little screen.
Well, my young neighbor to the rescue. He told Norie I could piggy-back off his server and gave her the password.  So... after five frustrating days ... I am back on line ... kind-of.

The server-on-loan is very very SLOW. It is very true that one does not realize what is important until it is gone. After all, I was able to live over half my life without the internet or even a computer.

Anyway, I had plenty of time for other things ... keeping busy to aid my frustration. The last few days have been sunny and I was able to wash and put away my warm sweatsuits. I put my sleeping bag out in the blustery balcony to air and then packed it up for the season.

In the winter my greenhouse is quite cold so I sleep in a sleeping bag with a down comforter over top and blankets as needed. Now it was time to take out my quilts so I pulled out the one in the picture above to spread on my futon.

Many years ago, I taught classes in "Quilt-as-you-go" for the women's society at church and the Tokyo American club. This quilt was one of the demonstration quilts made in 1994 and 1995.
Since these classes were mostly for foreigners, I chose Japanese patterns which I drafted into 12-inch blocks. There was a series of 9 classes, beginning with choosing fabrics and maps of where to look for and buy fabric, hand piecing, applique, adding sashing and preparing for quilting, quilting and couching, joining blocks, adding borders, then making and adding and turning binding.

The students had patterns for anything from a table runner to a wall quilt to a full size bed cover and could decide how much time they wanted to spend to make something using the techniques. (I think there were a few runners, a few baby quilts, and many full sized bed quilts finished. )

Well, this quilt is still in pretty good shape considering the years of use, but this morning in the light of day, I found the places sewed with purple thread are all coming apart.

I was not sure how the very slow connection would impact blogging so decided to take a picture of my mending challenge and give it a try.

Of course, while waiting for things to happen, I have sewed an entire block for the I-spy quilt.
I will also have to figure out if I can fix the couching as I had used a gold thread over a gold cord to add designs to some of the blocks, and that thread has not held up well. Some broken thread can be seen along the top edge of the floral fabric on the fan... so this will be the block I begin to fix.

After a night of rain, the sun is out. The wind is blasting all the plums off the tree, but otherwise this is about the quietest golden week I can remember. Maybe it was planned this way. Frustrations are falling away and problems are being taken care of. Gotta get creative if you walk in my shoes.