Tulip Tuesday

Here in Hokkaido we had what I considered an unbelievable amount of snow this past winter. Spring has finally come and the flowers are every bit as unbelievable as the snow was in the winter.  Everywhere you look!  Every bit of space outside of people’s homes is filled with flowers.  All of these photos were taken within a few blocks of where I live.

This woman invited us into her yard to give us a flower tour.

Japanese Syllables in English

All Japanese syllables except “n” end in a vowel. My English students are working on not making English words into Japanese sounding words and I think it is difficult for them. They naturally want to put a vowel at the end of any English word that ends in a consonant.  Anything ending in an “s” comes out sounding like it ends in “zu” (cheezu for cheese, onionzu for onions, and izu for is).  Most other words get an “o” ending (justo for just and breado for bread).

They are a group who like to have fun. Last week we had an exercise where they had to ask each other where different food items are located in the kitchen, with the possible answers being in the cabinet, in the freezer, in the refrigerator, and on the counter. “Refrigerator” turned out to be a new word for most of them and a difficult word to say. They all wanted to ask the next person about things that were in the refrigerator and laugh about the answer.  One person tried to respond that an item was in the freezer, but the others didn’t let him get away with not saying “refrigerator”.

Here are ten of my students (the other three are athletes who were gone for competitions that day).  This is not how they dress for my class.

Hardanger update

I’ve worked on the flower motifs.

I also did a little back stitch around the edge of the blanket stitch with one strand of matching floss.  I’ve been told I don’t need to do this, but I feel more comfortable cutting the outside away after I’ve this as reinforcement.

I have two more diamonds to do and have cut and removed the threads from the first one. I think the cut is a little cleaner when done on stretcher bars than when done in hand.