A Day Meant for Stitching

Yesterday was a gloomy, dark, rainy day. It was the kind of day you want to stay inside, drink hot tea, and stitch. That’s all I wanted to do, especially with the handanger project ready to work on.

I had to first do some housecleaning and laundry. You might say, why didn’t I leave that to do the next day? Our apartment and washing machine are very small.  If I don’t wash the breakfast dishes, there’re no clean dishes to eat from later in the day. If I don’t clean and put things away, there’s no room to sit and stitch. If I don’t do a small load of laundry every day, it piles up and there’s no room to hang it to dry. (But just so you know, I didn’t vacuum the floors yesterday).

Next, I had to go to Haruki. We grocery shop pretty much every day. We have a small refrigerator, plus it’s nice to have fresh food every day.

With the cleaning and shopping done, it was time to meet our friend for lunch at Bombay Blue. When we made plans last week, we didn’t know it would be a rainy-gloomy-day-meant-for-stitching-inside kind of day today. It was good to see her and hear about her recent trip to Washington DC, and as always, the food at Bombay Blue was delicious. And, I had to eat lunch anyway, right?

After that, I spent a little time preparing for my classes this week. Actually, I spent very little time doing this and will do better today. Last week in Japanese class we studied comparison sentences, so I have been trying, with my limited vocabulary, to think of other comparisons. The truck is bigger than the car: Torukku wa kuruma yori ookii desu. The rabbit is faster than the turtle: Usagi wa umigame yori hayoi desu. Now I need to figure out a situation where I can casually point out that cake is sweeter than bread or some such observation.  I bought some little notebooks for 58 yen each for writing practice. The pages have little boxes to help with character placement. Yes, I know, I need a lot of practice.

I did get to spend some time working on More Options. I finished the blanket stitch border and worked on some of the motifs. I’m never sure if it is the blanket stitch or the buttonhole stitch, but the teacher called it a blanket stitch in the directions, so it is. The outside border is done in DMC perle cotton #5 and the color is 932.  The threads used on the rest of the piece are Caron Watercolors and Wildflowers, both in color #133 Delphinium. My photography doesn't do the color of this project justice.