This week June-san invited me to go with her to make dolls for girls day. When we arrived they had 2 rooms set up with many beautiful Japanese dolls, quilts etc. Unfortunately I don't know the names of many of the things I saw. These are called Hagoita. They were once used to play a game similar to Badminton but are now used for decoration around New Years.
This is an antique doll from one of the sets. I absolutely loved this...The whole set was quite impressive.
These were impressive antiques as well....
This set up was showing how they made these dolls. It looks like hard work and the out come is incredible. Molds were used to cast the heads.
After casting the heads are painted.
Next the details are added to the heads.
And the finished product.
These were the dolls June-san and I made. I am not much of a sewer so I was happy there was glue involved too.
June san hard at work..
The finished product! :) I knew the kids would love these so I bought the materials so that Colleen could make the princess and Liam could make the prince.
After making these dolls, June-san took me to a wonderful restaurant. In this town there were 83 shops that had the Hinamatsuri dolls on display.....It was truly festive. The food was oishii(tasty) and as always any time I get to spend time with June-san is enjoyable
On Monday when making the dolls,the sensei told us about a class to make silk sakura flowers.
Unfortunately neither June-san or myself are sewers. On Thursday, two hours into the class June-san and I were laughing. There was no glue involved this time. It took us along time and we had a lot of fun trying to keep our needle threaded. 3 hours into the class we were the last ones remaining and a woman from the afternoon class was beginning her flower. We decided to finish on our own.... Fortunately the sensei gave me a finished product. I am hoping to enlist my mother-in-law into helping me make some when I return. She can REALLY sew!
That was Kate's activity for the week. This is Larry, on Sunday I was originally invited to snowboard with a couple of coworkers. Unfortunately it rained all day on Saturday and continued on into Sunday. As a result we scrapped the plans to snowboard and decided to go bouldering (climbing) in a local gym. Hoshi san, Ohbayashi san, Sagawa san and I all went together. Hoshi san was a member of the gym so he walked the rest of us through the process. There are no ropes in the gym, all the walls are shorter and so they are not needed. There are a number of different routes to climb and the difficulty is color coded. Hoshi san had the most skill out of everyone and was able to scale some pretty difficult routes.
In this picture of Sagawa san you can see that there are many different holds, each route is numbered and colored and so the intent is that you follow only one path and not just pick any that look good.
Ohbayashi san just starting his route.
And me with my incredibly painful tiny rental shoes climbing the wall. It was good exercise. I could tell I was finished when my grip faded to the point that I could no longer hang on to the wall. After that even putting on my shoes was a difficult task.
Finally for this week I bought some (プリン) pudding kit kats. In Japan the pudding is pretty popular. It tastes a bit like creme brulee. The children have really taken a liking to it. This is what the pudding looks like.
And here are the Kit Kats. There are actually a variety of flavors available, but this is the only kind I could find at the store currently. They taste like the real pudding. Pretty tasty.
That is all for this week, have a great week.
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