Happy boy ... Happy Grandma

This past week, the rainbow quilt reached Oregon and its new owner. Ben can now take the baby quilt off his bed and use his "Big Boy" quilt. I was so happy it had reached him safely as a former package had been returned to us as un-deliverable with the box empty. We have also had packages arrive that had been opened for inspection with box cutters which ruined the contents. This time I probably over-wrapped the box and sent it with a tracer. Unlike Japan, if you are not home to receive the package, you will have to go and pick it up within time limits unknown.
Attached to Ben's wonderful note was this picture I don't think he will mind sharing. Does he look happy? His sunny smile is catching.

We have been having rainy weather this week and it is getting colder.

I have pulled my down sleeping bag out of storage for colder nights. It is hard to believe how hot is was just a few weeks ago

The Toad Lilies are in bloom. Called "Hototogisu" in Japanese, the name of a bird, I think they are so beautiful.

When we lived in Suginami-ku, there was a house I passed on the back streets from the station to home. Every year I admired rows of these lilies along the front of the house.

Then one day, the house was being torn down and once the debris was removed, bulldozers  arrived and the lot was being turned into a parking lot.

Well, I just couldn't picture those lily bulbs covered with asphalt, so I went home and got a small shovel and a bag and dug at the place I had seen them growing. Sure enough, they were resting there un-knowing and I removed as many as I could locate. Some went home with my daughter and the rest were planted at the garden there.

When we moved back to Nerima, I remembered those bulbs.

The garden here is very small and has very little sun, as there is a wall and a three-story house to the South ... about a meter away.

I left most of the bulbs in the sunny garden but brought a small planter full, hoping they would survive here.


They do grow wild along the forest edges and they don't seem to mind the shortage of direct sun outside my garden door.

Aren't they charming?
I'm so glad they are not sitting under pavement in a parking lot.

Overlooking the lilies is this wonderful staghorn-fern.

The wife of a good friend died a few months ago.

She had been an avid plant collector and her husband had no idea how to care for her very large collection of exotic plants.

A few weeks ago, some of them came to Tokyo and after looking them over, ended up with a small collection of my own.

Right now this big fellow is hanging from my clothes poles. As it gets colder, I will have to rig a place to hand it in my little greenhouse. I do have one sitting in a bowl of rocks which once belonged to my #4 daughter. That one has fewer but larger horns. This one will have to be hung as there are appendages coming out in all directions.

Most of the other plants were exotic succulents from South Africa. I have quite a collection myself as those are the only plants that don't die from the heat of summer or the cold in winter (or the neglect while I am away).
I think my old cacti have perked up with the new members added to the family. Maybe they are practicing Afrikaans or teaching a bit of Espanol or English. One thing for certain, I will have to stop collecting, as there is hardly room to hang my laundry.

The Christmas tree skirt has been on hold waiting for promised snowflake patterns.

I have decided to wait no longer and need to get this finished and in the mail. If I hadn't waited, it would have been done long enough ago to be in the box with Ben's quilt.

I still have a door hanging to start and I really will do anything not to be caught in a deadline.

Tomorrow is a big family day as Leia will be all decked out in a beautiful kimono for "Shichi-go-san", the festival where boys and girls of the ages three, five, and seven go to visit the local shrines.

It will mean dressing up and taking pictures and eating a fancy meal. I hope it will stop raining. My rain shoes are anything but dressy and today someone took my umbrella!

In Tokyo there are two choices on a rainy day. One is that some stores have a dispencer of long plastic bags ... you take one and insert your dripping umbrella into the bag, disposing of it as you leave. (something that seems rather wasteful to me) But that is the usual system when you enter a store or building with many exits.
The other plan is an umbrella rack near the door. I have one at my house, the church has one at each door, the school has one on each floor outside the elevator, etc. Today I went out and left my umbrella in a rack at the clinic. It is easy to identify because it has a loop at the end of the handle. When I first got it I hung a tiny macrame bag containing a turquoise rock from the loop. Someone must have liked the idea because the bag and rock was removed ... not an easy thing to do unless it was cut off. So... I replaced it with a cute hanging owl charm. I thought the owl would be able to guard the umbrella better (more eyes than a rock) and certainly someone pulling it out of the stand would notice they had the wrong umbrella. I guess it didn't work. I came home in the rain and embroidered FUKUDA on all my remaining umbrellas. I hope I will not have to use one tomorrow.

I hope you all have a great weekend and it doesn't rain on your parade either.

It's a finish!

Last night I put the final stitches in the rainbow quilt. That was the good thing about a day of rain ... in the end, you get the rainbow. Of course, by that time, there was no sun and I had to wait until today for a photo op.

Here is the front displayed on the park fence. The colors seem a bit washed out but I have better ones on another camera so those I print directly from that camera will go into my paper diary.
I am glad I added the outer light border and also I  am glad the binding covered the short-fall.

Today as I was cutting up the trimmed scraps to go into tins of various sizes, I was even more glad I had found a better solution.

And here is the back. Ben may choose this as the top because it is the purple and lime green he requested. The quilted stitches fall off the grid in a few places (mostly around the edges). I am satisfied though with the results and I hope Ben will be too. Finished size, 74" x 92".

When I made Ben's baby quilt so many years ago, he was just a promise ... a picture of a little baby waiting in Korea for a family to claim him. As I worked on this piece I was thinking of the boy I now know and love so much ... A fellow lefty and in his right mind, a kid who shares my love of woodcarving and can turn a block of wood into a cute owl in an afternoon. I wish I could fly to Oregon and deliver it in person. You can believe my hugs will go into the box with it.

As I was taking these pictures in the park, the window in the upstairs of the house behind slid open and a head came out. This house is actually across the street from where my in-laws used to live and the Obaasan stuck out her head and asked what I was doing.

I called up to her that I was taking a picture of a finished quilt that I planed to send to my grandson. "Oh, I want to see." and the window slid shut. Pretty soon, around the block and through through the park came the elderly lady. She helped me take the quilt down and fold it after examining it in detail.
She said her daughter is a quilter (and actually lives nearby). Maybe a new friend? (she is preparing something for January ... The Tokyo Dome show?) I hope some day I can meet her.

I was hoping by today my laptop would decide to accept my camera in a download. I went through the same steps already tried over and over. When I plugged my camera into the port it went "peep" so I know the camera greeted the computer ... but alas, the computer still could not recognize the camera. The message kept saying the same ... plug in camera, turn on, and click refresh. Nope nothing. I finally had my husband download them to his computer again and mail them to me as last time. Even that adds an hour or so of fiddling before they are accessible for me to use.  Why did something so easy before, become so difficult that now I have to rely on a step I have no control over?
Anyway, enjoy the pictures and celebrate with me the finish!

Creative solutions???

 I seem to be spending a lot of time fixing things that shouldn't be broken in the first place.

When I finished quilting the border around the rainbow quilt, I decided it would look better if it had a one-inch border on the outside edge rather than bind it directly.

On three edges it was quite easy because the backing extended beyond the quilt top.

One edge across the top was a problem. When I laid it out on the floor for basting, I placed the backing, then the batting, and then tried to position the top in the center. It might have been helpful to have someone assist me to lower the top onto the batting but I had to roll the top out, adjusting it as I went along. Meanwhile, the backing which I had taped to the floor, became un-stuck. That alone caused a few problems when quilting but I was able to get things smoothed out as I moved the quilt in the hoop, removing the basting when needed.

The only real problem when adding the outer border was that the backing edge, though OK with the cable border, was short about half to three fourths of an inch. As I was sewing that last strip, I was thinking I could add another inch of backing along that edge.

Then I got another plan. I decided to cut the binding for the top a bit wider so that I could turn it down to meet the fabric where it was short. You can see how it looks on the back in the above picture. I quilted it along the sewing line on the front so the total effect is no different from the regular binding.

I couldn't make a mitered corner with two different sizes of binding but I think this solution is working and will hardly be noticeable. (at least by a man riding by on a fast horse).

Two edges are now finished ... two more to go. 

I have to admit that I probably would have finished this up today had I never been tempted by windows 10 last week. One thing has not returned to normal yet.

In the past, when I wanted to download pictures from my camera, I would plug the camera into my laptop and turn it on, then go to the picture file. In the list would be the name of the camera and when I right-clicked that, I got to the place to download any recent pictures. My computer looked over the camera files and just took the new stuff, giving me the option to put a title on the download. Oh, so simple!

Since returning to windows 7, my picture section does not recognize my cameras. When I click on the import icon, a window pops up saying to plug in the camera and turn it on. Well, it does not work from that point on but there is a message saying if you don't see the camera identification, push refresh. No amount of refreshing would fix the problem.

After hours of working at trying everything to get the pictures to download, I took my camera to my husband at his computer and asked him to download those two pictures on to his computer and send them to me by e-mail. 

Well, they came in the mail by Jpeg and the next three or four hours were wasted getting them into a file where I could locate them to download to the blog. As a result you can see the pictures of my quilting solutions. The camera issues are still remaining. Please enjoy the pictures and appreciate the hoops I jumped through to do what was once a no-brainer. I really need a resident guru who speaks English. There has gotta be an easier way.

And another solution that seems to work ... you may recall that when Ben requested purple as one of his favorite colors, I had almost no purple fabric. Thanks to friends to the rescue, he will now have purple and lime green on the back.,,, but, when I went to my thread stash to find something for sewing the binding ... no purple there either! I did find a blue that is very close so that is what I am using . The blind stitching doesn't really show and I am not going to go out in the rain to find a store that carries purple thread. 

My #1 rule is ... if it works, it is the right way.

Facing challenges

I am always impressed by my many blogging friends who love to join in to all kinds of challenges.

There are block swaps and all kinds of group challenges involving the creation of blocks or even whole quilts. I browse these posts with a great deal of awe.

Sometimes it is all I can do to manage the assorted challenges that life tosses my way ...
without looking for more.

Continuing challenge #1 is the tucks in the basted backing of Ben's rainbow quilt. I have now quilted most of the center. I started with the center two blocks and have been going around those two, increasing one row at a time. So far I am satisfied that the quilting on the back is coming out relatively square. As I near the borders, I have reached the places where there are tucks in the basted back.

Yesterday I began the outer row and so far I have been able to remove all the basting and smooth out the tucks in the hoop as I go. This challenge is one block at a time. It means a lot more stopping and starting than I like (I usually work with a very long piece of thread so I don't have to stop and start so often). This way I work the rows leading to the border and then do the cross rows one-by-one.

The nice thing is that now I am nearing the edge, there is less quilt to sit under. Seeing the progress encourages me to keep going and dreaming of the day Ben can take the baby quilt off his bed and have a big-boy quilt to replace it.

Yesterday I added another challenge to the equation.  I had a date set up with one of my best friends who came to Japan for the up-coming World Scout Jamboree.

He will be off to the site tomorrow and had brought me a huge shopping bag of fabric that his mother was cutting from her stash.

Of course this is not the first "gift" she has sent.
Last time I needed to drive my car to pick up the many boxes he brought. (In fact, this may be her way of getting me to live to 200 just to use it all).

I figured one large shopping bag could be put into my roller bag and I could tale the train for free with only a short walk to the meeting spot.

Rushing around to get things organized so I could get out the door in a timely fashion, I kicked something. I can't even remember what it was ... a chair leg ... a corner of the furniture ... the door frame ... but when I finally stopped long enough to look, my little toe was sticking straight out at 45degrees from my foot. Oh, that does not look good. I tried pushing it back so I could put on some shoes. Nope, not going to work. Well I was pressed for time but I hopped on my bike and pedaled
off to the local clinic.

So much for my schedule. x-rays did not look good and it took several sets of x-rays and a lot of pulling and twisting before the toe was back on the right direction. Then a partial cast and all kinds of instructions about not walking and elevating my foot etc. etc. I barely had time left when I got home to change my clothes and grab my roller bag and rush out to the train station, calling my friend to say I might be a wee bit late. Actually the 15 minute walk didn't take so much longer so I was still in time.

One thing though, Those "Silver Seats" which are reserved for the elderly, physically handicapped, pregnant women, etc mean NOTHING to the average rider. They may line up while waiting for the train to arrive, but once the doors open ... it is everyone for himself ... the fastest and pushiest get any free seats. The rest are squashed in and you are lucky to end up with your body relatively above your feet or with a grip within reach. Crutches, walking sticks, casts on feet, mean nothing

When my kids were young and paying half fare, I told them I never wanted to see them sitting as long as there was someone older standing. Travelling with them yet today I notice they hardly ever sit. However, when the seat was offered to a mother with little kids, she would put the kid on the seat and remain standing. Japan has raised several generations of kids who still feel entitled to sit. Since they are all sleeping or texting or reading cartoon magazines or playing games in their i-pads, they conveniently can not notice anyone standing. Well, the train ride was only 29 minutes each way so not too bad.

Sunday I attended with our choir, a memorial service for a long-time member who had recently passed away.

At the end, those in the congregation followed the Japanese tradition of putting flowers on the table in front of the picture of the deceased.

The florist had provided  large white chrysanthemums all in a uniform size. They must have been imported because this is hardly the time of year for chrysanthemums. As we were leaving after the fellowship hour at the end, we were offered flowers to take home. Those Japanese members of the group would never take them home so the foreigners were pressed with big bunches. Well, why not?
Mine went into the entry-way where I can enjoy them coming and going and considering the heat, they have lasted quite well.

The final challenge is the silkworms.

There are still 12 cocoons that have not hatched. I rather doubt that they will as some are way too unfinished or have signs that the efforts to get out didn't work. (dark spots indicate the liquid emitted to dissolve the silk at the opening did not work.

Note the wimpy wings on this little lady.
The eggs are a bit smaller than poppy seeds.

I will put them in a zip=lock baggy and stick them at the back of the vegetable drawer until next summer. It might pe a bit of a challenge to get things right to raise another generation.

Enjoy all your challenges ... the most frustrating one of mine is not doing vacation bible school games with my foot in a cast, it is facing the continuing problem of being no-reply on many of my long-tram favorite blogs.

more silkworm trivia

Yesterday I had an early start to my day.

I left before 7:am for a pre-school who had expressed some interest in interviewing me for a job. Though the interview was around noon, I wanted to have a look at the school and see how the classes were run. Luckily I was able to spend time during the morning in a class with kids and teachers. Two to four year olds have a lot of energy but they are fun to be with and the morning flew by.

I was able to get a more complete tour of the school after the interview. The building used to be apartments and my son-in-law was the architect who converted the space into class rooms and activity areas. Though space was small compared to other schools in the area, the space they did have was very efficiently used and well organized. The director held my SIL in high regard. I think it will be an interesting place to work on a part-time basis,

When I returned home in the afternoon, two of the silkworms had hatched out and were sitting on the side of their apartments. This morning, 14 more crept out of their cocoons. I had never in the past paid much attention to the schedule but it took from four to five weeks for caterpillar to cocoon and a little over two weeks for hatching to begin.

This morning, before I even came downstairs, the first two pairs had formed. These moths look well developed but are unable to fly.

More often they have stubby wings like the one in this picture


So far, there are only two pairs.
Those  others are sitting around waiting for a partner to hatch out.

Just like the caterpillars that patiently sit and wait for leaves to drop on their heads, the moths patiently sit and await a mate.

Though it is getting very hot and humid for sitting under a hoop, I have completed quilting 31 blocks.

Checking the back, I have not yet arrived at the problem areas but so far, what I had considered a possible problem of crooked quilt lines on the back side, seem to be not as expected. If this might be used as a reversible quilt, I worried about how the quilting would line up.

So far, so good.

We are enjoying another very hot sunny day but a typhoon is moving in from the south-east and should make changes by tonight. (hopefully with enough warning to run and shut windows).

Back to normal

Well, here is the picture I couldn't share yesterday.

Today my screen returned to its former configuration and I decided to give my camera another try.

It was nice and quiet basting here on the floor. No one came into the room to see what was going on.

If I do this again though, I will bring a needle threader. The lighting was not all that good and each time I put in a new thread I wasted a lot of time.

Today I decided to try in-the-ditch quilting. My concern was how it would look on the back if the top was not straight.

I began with my large hoop and quilted the two blocks in the center.

I plan to work my way out and think I can correct the wrinkles in the backing, as they are all around the edges ... by just removing the basting once it is in the hoop.

The stitching seems to be straight enough in lining up with the back blocks.

That is a big relief because I really find in-the-ditch quilting the easiest way to go.


It is getting warm and quite muggy so I don't think much will get done during the summer but it is nice having it all set to go when the spirit moves.

Meanwhile, I have begun working on my partnership block for the Tokyo Dome show.
There is a deadline for when it must reach NHK by the 31st of August. It won't take me that long but I hate waiting until the last minute. In that regard, I am my father's daughter.

And here are the cocoons.

Out of 50 eggs that came in the mail, 44 made it to this stage.
Two chose not to use an apartment  but spun in the corners. Some of these may still be spinning, making the cocoons stronger. For a while you can see them moving inside when the light comes through.

During summer, our church goes from two to one service, starting earlier than usual. That means choir practice will begin at 8:45 ... an early rise for me ... and I am not the only member living out in the boonies so I shouldn't complain. We will follow the service with a choir picnic. I hope the weather will cooperate but last prediction I heard was rain. My plants are very happy though, and the agapanthus  is blooming in two planters.

Rainy day plans

Well, the backing for the quilt is assembled.

I took it to the park yesterday afternoon for a picture and was planning to take the supplies to our church and borrow the floor of the fellowship hall to do the basting today.

BUT... Today it is raining and I have reconsidered, thinking of the walk to and from the stations at each end, carrying everything plus an umbrella.
Tomorrow I have to go for choir practice anyway so I may as well go four or five hours earlier and do it then.

The photo is not very true with either the purples or the lime greens and the balance could have been better if I could have seen the whole thing at once for making the arrangements.

Anyway, I went with plan "B" which was a trip to the barber for a haircut. The boy cut is only 1.000 yen so I got a nice crew cut that should be good for the hot summer and last through October.

I picked three fresh mulberry leaves along the way home for the last two silkworms. When I put them on top of the two lingering munchers, the one caterpillar that had been checking out the apartments, came back down for a snack. All the others in the group are weaving or resting in their cocoons.

On the home front, the bulletin board has been re-set in it's new spot. The head of the neighborhood association has agreed for the neighborhood to pay for the work.

I say it is ridiculous that we pay for the Ku's poor planning ... or total lack of planning. I have talked with housewives in the area and they all think it is stupid the way the work is being done but no one ... including my husband, wants to rock the boat by objecting... or cause trouble for the association head.

Meanwhile, there is more trouble.

When the corner house was rebuilt, the city grabbed a meter of property from both the south side, causing the bulletin board incident, and another meter from the west side.

They paved a new section, removing the driveway entrance for the house and putting in a curb ... but, because the rest of the street is still the old width and the sewer is now a meter from the curb, the street became a lake. They had to come back and remove the street they put in and dig under the old street to add a length to the sewer. At this point it is raining and the new sewer sitting high above the street surrounded by curbs to the east and west.  A good example of the old saying, "Fail to plan, plan to fail". Of course the electric poles remain in the same location so the street is only a meter wider for a few meter's length.

Design window Monday

This weekend I began sorting and measuring my green and purple fabrics and sewing them together in bits and pieces.

There is really no place in my house I can lay them out while deciding what to put where.

The upper left corner and the lower right corner are together and am still interviewing scraps and measuring  and pinning and sewing.

Once I decide what to put where, I can use the sections as take-along work. Everything was drawn out on graph paper but I am altering the plans as I go out of necessity ... why cut and sew if I can find something that fits ?  So far, so good, and I am able to fit in those purples that are toward the red side as well as the bluer ones. The batik segments help work things out.

Saturday afternoon Nikko and I took a very long walk looking for more mulberry leaves. Many of those trees I had been relying on were cut down while I was at camp. They grow fast once they get established and are considered weeds or "Junk trees". Once they begin to grow, the new branches can reach over a meter and then they get noticed and cut down.

When I returned, some of the caterpillars had moved into the apartments I had created Friday night by toilet paper tubes cut in thirds.

Today all three apartment blocks had critters moving in, though there are still a few chomping. I am relieved that it seems I will have enough supply of leaves to get them through their last phase.

Notice how those critters seem to like the upper stories. I doubt it is for the view but I am thinking of flipping the section once the top is full.

Someone asked what I would do with the cocoons. Of course I have no plans to weave silk.

I tape those inside a large paper bag and clip it closed.

When the cocoons hatch, the moths are big and fat with short stubby wings and cannot fly. They sit in the bag and wait.When a moth of the opposite sex hatches out, they get very excited and flap the wings, walking to join the partner and mate. They mate, lay eggs on the side of the bag, and die.

I will cut out the egg patches and put them in a zip-lock bag, and stick them in the back of the vegetable drawer in the fridge until next May when the trees brake out with new leaves.

The cocoons can be used for crafts and finger puppets. A few cocoons fail to hatch out and a few caterpillars have died along the way. I have to be careful to protect them from ants that often get into the house. I did find a small ant along with one dead caterpillar and know from experience they can kill a whole tray over night. I saw some reporting on CNN while working today about silk worm production. I saw the man giving whole branches rather than single leaves ... but I knew that. I would have liked to ask about how they keep the critters safe from ants ... but that topic didn't come up.

Aren't they cute?

Maybe you don't like bugs but they are soft and cool to the touch and completely helpless...

Here they sit, quietly munching,
or perhaps inspecting an apartment,

relying totally on my ability to spot a mulberry leaf poking out of a hedge or along a park wall ...

To pick the good ones and wash them and keep them fresh in the fridge ... noticing when they need more...
Nice to have a pet that is not dropping hair all over the house either.

Moving along

I was able to mark the border fabric for Ben's quilt on Tuesday evening  ... big table  and I was already there for a meeting.

Since then, I managed to sew on all four borders and I like the results.

The flimsy is 72 inches wide and 91 inches long.

The big-boy quilt I made for his brother is 76 x 86
and the book club quilt on my futon is 63 x 83.

I laid this out on the double bed in the loft and there seems to be enough length to tuck in. Right now the boys are sharing a bunk so for now it should be big enough for a growing teen.


The  rain was just beginning when I hustled out to the park to get a picture. Nikko says, "Hurry up and let's get out'a here. I'm getting damp and so is the quilt".

At Monday's group gathering, Kuraishi sensei demonstrated a way to piece the backing.

She whipped this up in no time at all with a machine and a rotary cutter.

For combining random blocks it seemed very handy.

Looking through my bits and pieces, I have set out 5 greens, about 9 purples, and three combinations plus the border fabric.

I would like a mixture of sizes and to put each fabric in at least two places for balance. One advantage of using sensei's plan is I would not have to worry about making all those corners meet exactly.  One disadvantage is I would have to drag out my tiny machine and find a space to leave it while I work ... if the machine still actually runs.

I have seen another idea where you cut all the fabric the same size and then cut it several times with a rotary cutter and then take different fabrics from the pile while assembling the blocks, Of course that is assuming all of the scraps I have chosen are the same size and shape ... which they are not.

Another way might be to cut them in multiples of the same number, like 12 x 12 and 6 x 18 and the like. Depending on size, I could use some of the larger scraps to fill big areas and it would be easier to quilt through with fewer seams.  That is the way I am leaning at this point. Maybe if I set the back on point, the quilting on the top would go better ... or at least look better on the back.

It is a sure thing the backing will be pieced. It will meet Ben's request for purple and lime green so if he wants, he can use that as the top side. I should be able to get something together for quilting once the hot summer is over.

The silk worms are really gobbling the leaves now and I had to take the bike out to hunt more supplies mulberry leaves. At this point, I can actually hear them chomping, a rather peaceful sound.

While at camp, I was interviewed for a TV program. I don't know how it turned out as it was for the channel used on the military bases. I have no idea why they selected some old lady to interview but I did have an opportunity to express the importance of experiencing nature first hand, even in the rain.
If I couldn't spot a mulberry tree at a distance, there would be a lot of unhappy critters, and they do pose a lesson for the next generations.

Border and backing time

Today I finished the white strips around the edges and laid the quilt out on the bed to try fabrics for the border.


This one is a batik.

It is rather dark and also kind of a floral.

I tried it with each of the corner areas.

None of the blocks seem to have issues with this fabric.

The fabric definitely contains purple and lime green.


My only question is whether it might be too much of a floral for a thirteen year old boy.

 Then I tried a border that is a bit lighter.

The print is puzzle pieces.

The green is not  as lime green as the batik.

Maybe puzzle pieces are more boy-friendly than flowers?


Oh my, now I don't know which to choose.

I laid out some of the assorted donated fabrics to see how I might piece the backing.

Those greens are really a lot more lime than they appear in the photograph.

The purples run from blueish to pinkish but the variety isn't bad.

I am not sure how to go about putting them all together as there is no place to just lay them out. I might cut them in multiples of two or three inches to make it easier

Among assorted donated fabric there might be more pieces I could use.

Ben plays soccer and there is a lot of that fabric ... and it contains purple and green.

The purple stripe at the upper right is plentiful but a bit boring to use as a border.

There is the fish batik I picked up at the Tokyo Dome show and a green batik in a large amount.

Well, now I have time to think this over. Tonight I have to run a Cub Scout Pack meeting. Tomorrow I will be getting things ready for a week long Scout camp. If I can decide by tomorrow, I could get the borders measured and marked and cut so I could work on the border at camp.
When I made the big boy quilt for brother Paul, I never asked. (and he liked it fine as far as I know).
And, knowing Ben, he will be happy just to have something a bit bigger and less juvenile than his alphabet quilt now on his bunk.
Decisions, decisions, always decisions! Shall I just flip a coin?

Rainy season

The rainy season has officially begun so this seems a good time to work on the rainbow quilt.


The last time I worked on this was the beginning of November last year when all the blocks were assembled.


Several people suggested I add a white border around the blocks.

Since all the pieces are scrappy, I thought a plain white border might be a bit severe so I took out my buckle box of white print scraps and cut 46 one-by-six inch scraps.

Then I began sewing them along the edges of the rainbow flimsy.

I think it was a good suggestion.

I still have two more borders to finish and by then I need to come up with a plan for the outer border.

To be the right size, it needs to be about five inches all around.

This quilt will go to my #2 grandson, Ben.
He wanted something in purple and lime green but has agreed to take this one.

Over the last half year, my friends have been helping me by donating fabrics in those two colors. I probably have enough for a border but certainly it would have to be pieced. I was thinking about flying geese in a variety of purples and greens but as I am sewing these strips to the edge I am beginning to think all this piecing is getting to be too much.

Now I am wondering what it might be like to just sew all those assorted purples and greens together into one big piece and make that the backing, then find a nice print for the front border ... and maybe the back border if I don't have enough. That way it would be a reversible quilt and Ben could use it as he wishes. Among my donated fabrics I might have a stripe or striped print that would work.

I would have to have a plan that works with the purples and greens but I could use them in fairly large chunks so the sewing would go a lot faster than a few hundred wild geese. Does that sound like a workable alternative?  Any other ideas?  It's past my bedtime so I'm off to dream of a plan.