Sewing&reaping

My dear blog. It’s been too long. I think you are officially retired. What happens to blogs on the intrawebs when people stop updating them?

Well, at least it hasn’t been a complete month.

Wah. Where has the time gone?! It’s been a while. My bad. Not much has happened in my little world. Well not much craftiness at home but bucket loads at school. It’s so amazing having so many materials to use! It’s all 100¥ store stuff. But oh so great!

Eyeballs drying in the toy microwave. Nice.

Blood & monster blood (glue & paint dried on plastic, excellent for sticking onto smooth surfaces)

Like the whiteboard & the clock.

I spent so long trying to make spiderwebs, rolling toy stuffing, glueing yarn together & then it entered my head to stick the stuffing to the sticky side of tape & arrange! I like the finished product.

Pipe cleaner spider web over our doorway. That sucker took along time! But the majority of my class is boys & they love Spider-Man. So our halloween means spiders spiders spiders!

My wee 3&4 yr olds loved this so much!! They all got to splat their bloodied hand prints on the walls (paint over tape)

And then we take it all down next week after our halloween party 😦

> When I preview my post the photos are small, bit crappy quality. Is it just me??

I made 2 more hydro bonsai plants. One I gave as a gift, the other…

I found some Japanese bleach hair dye yesterday so I got busy last night. Much happier this time.

Next post will be full of the crafty fun I’ve been getting up to at school. Autumn & Halloween!

So the big event was 2 days ago. I made it at home & had to de-assemble & then reassemble at the venue.
The first assembling was a bit hectic coz I ended up having to fight Winie for all the diaper cake ‘ingredients’. The second time was a breeze.
I could not find anything resembling the long western style receiving blankets & ended up using face towel type things. They are so popular in Japan. Oh boy. Super useful mind you. Like a handkerchief sized towel (info for my non-Japanese residing peeps)
Many pictures.

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Little tiny tootsies. Awwwww

Afore mentioned hanky towels. Oooh. I like that. Hanky towels. I’m gunna go with that.

Some of the hanky towels had stars & so did the bibs, so a theme other than just boy blue was running through it, which made me happy. I was hoping for brown & blue. Didn’t quite happen.

Random extra odds & ends.

Little miss stole as much as she could & tried to hide it from me… You can see her hovering in some of the above photos, go back & spot the little toes in the corners.

Which called for a hasty retreat to the messy dining room table.

They see me rollin’, they hatin’. (appropriate?)

Rear wheels ready.

Rolling the hanky towels with yarn threaded through the middle.

I had no pins so secured the hanky towels with tape. Was shocked to see the carnage the tape did!

Woops. Forgot the ribbon. Had to unthread the hanky towel wrapped yarn & pretty up the ‘wheels’. Totally the way I end up doing everything. Hahaha.

The ribbon was so fiddly! And I could only tape it on in place. Probably the most frustrating part of all. I couldn’t find any thicker ribbon, it would definately have helped. I got two types to make it more interesting. An interesting nightmare!!

Had the bottle around the wrong way here, should have the cap to the front. Dinner time for little lady in the background.

And voila!

Didn’t take a picture from the back. Wasn’t very pretty. Probably needed bigger bibs or to wrap the diapers more tightly. The wheels were quite big. So the bib that was acting as a seat kept just slipping down between the back wheels. I put another of the hanky towels across the two wheels & then put the seat bib on top.

Ready to go!

On display. I added a bow over the bottle/head light. & someone popped a stuffed monkey on for a ride.

Oh! Found a back shot. Would have been cool to maybe have another bottle & rest it on top of the hanky towel holding the back wheels together, as a tail light.

It served its purpose well. The mother-to-be wouldn’t let me take it apart for her to take home, she insisted on it going into a bag still together. And it made it back to her place safe. Yay!

Baby boy diaper shower. I’ve never really understood diaper cakes. I mean I get that you need loads of diapers with a fresh baby & just a bag of them isn’t the most prettiest. But why a cake?? Coz a baby shower is a celebration I guess, all other occasions have cakes yeah? Engagement party, birthday party, wedding. Did I just answer my own question?
I like being unconventional. So I’m making a diaper trike!! It’s gunna turn out more expensive than a diaper cake, it needs extra props. But giving someone just diapers is a bit poxy no?
As always I took my brain to google. And looked at a few different processes with the same end product & then did it my own way 🙂
This is what I hope it will look somewhat like –

Just a lil’ FYI, it feels kinda wrong saying diaper. In Australia it’s nappy. But diaper seems more internationally accepted? Maybe it sounds more professional. But also wrong.
Pt 2 will include all the fun extras. Haven’t got them yet, so I just built all the wheels this evening.
Here is my journey so far.

Winie went insane over the Anpanman diapers. She thought they were hers and screamed about it alot. I think he’s a scary ugly little old man personally.

Annoyingly the diapers came folded over in 3, so I had to unfold them ALL. Took a long time. But it was worth it.

Books came in handy squishing the diapers flat after the refolding step.

Some website said to put the diapers in a cake pan to help with the round shape, another wrapped one diaper into a tight cylinder and then wrapped the others around it. I grouped mine in fives & rubber banded them. Then kinda made a star & tried to make it all round from there. It worked ok.

15 diapers per back wheel. 25 diapers for the front wheel. Once I secured the circle with a rubber band I removed the rubber bands from the smaller groupings.

So next I gotta get 2 bibs, a bottle, ribbon, 2 receiving blankets, a pair of socks & stuffed teddy to ride it.
Bet you can’t wait for the long winded part 2!!

Yo yo. Yolk. Ha.
Now that we are past that last sentence, since my foray into the world of ombré hair fashion I honestly haven’t been all that thrilled by my new multi hued locks. The double hair colouring had left my ends brittle & fruzzy & ewk. I’d googled some all natural hair treatments the other day. Flat beer. Olive oil. Honey. Avocado. Lemon juice. Egg yolks. Mayonnaise. Gosh, almost everything.
And then two nights ago I cut my hair. Instant improvement! Spaz ends removed. Peeps actually asked if I’d coloured my hair!? I guess coz I’d cut off the blondest parts. Kinda sad, a MUCH more subtle ombré now.

But today I bought an avocado & thought, ‘what the hey! Let’s goop up my hair anyway!’ Avocado & egg yolks, to moisturise & de-frizz.

I tried to get a really squishy overripe avocado, but when I opened it, it was gorgeous! Felt like a bit of a shame to paste it all over my head.

Some online ‘recipes’ said to use half an avocado & 2 tablespoons egg yolk. I used 2 egg yolks & a whole avocado & I’d say it wasn’t enough, probably double it next time.

mmmm chunky.
Gotta wait like an hour now I guess & then rinse it out. Some ‘recipes’ said just wait till it hardens, but that started happening almost immediately. Made sure to use a hair tie that I don’t mind throwing out, I really don’t want eggy smelling accessories! Actually my head smells like a nice avocado. It’s not too bad.
POST SHOWER
Hmm. Well I only remembered after I’d gotten into my nice hot shower that I was supposed to have a lukewarm shower so that the egg didn’t cook. Cooked egg in hair. Nice. So rinsed, washed & conditioned hair as normal. Afterwards I combed my hair as there was still avocado fibre left behind, not the actual green flesh. And some little pieces of egg white. Turns out my egg separating technique needs some work. Now my hair is starting to dry, noticing its shinier, but feels more coarse & seems more frizzy. Maybe I just don’t know what actual healthy hair is meant to look like??
I’ll update tomorrow with the final verdict.
UPDATE: so, nothing too noticeable to be honest. A bit softer, a bit thicker (more moisturised?) but no less frizzy. And maybe extra puff. I do recall that avocado adds volume. And that wasn’t quite what I was after. I’m gunna give beer a shot next.

And probably taking photos in natural light might help too.

I have my first plant. It’s a cheat plant. I wouldn’t really call it hydro-culture, but it’s along those lines. A plant in water in a glass bottle. It’s worked for me before. Exact same ingredients. It probably lived for a whole year (which for me is an achievement) the last time & only reason it died was because we were in another country for 2 months & our friend forgot to refill it.
The plant is called クワズイモ which is apparently alocasia. I googled it & it gets to be a pretty huge plant. Oh and it’s meant to be lightly watered. Ha. Well I know that it survived fine last time. They don’t do so well in winter though.
There are these cute little apple juices I buy sometimes & I really can’t bring myself to throw away glass bottles. Just the other day I kept some glass coffee bottles which aren’t as big or as pretty as the apple juice ones but the neck opening is wider, which worked out perfect because I would have had to have removed the root system altogether to fit the plant in the apple juice bottle. I used colourful water ball things to help the plant stay up right, but it’s probably not necessary with a narrow necked bottle. It does help to keep the plant from just sitting on the bottom & it’s more aesthetic. And topped it with water. Apparently Bottled spring water is better than tap water, so ill buy some, but last time I used tap water & like i mentioned, the little guy survived.
I’m rambling & I took heaps of pictures so I wouldn’t need to, so listen with your eyeballs, do.

First I gathered the basic ingredients.

And voila!
I guess it’s not gunna grow too much. I’ll have to trim the roots regularly & every so often completely change the water.
Hydro-bonsai!

Felt like its been a while, but it really hasn’t. I feel like I’ve been up to alot & at the same time up to nothing.
Hmmm. So I have 7 sets of curtains to alter. Fun. (and by that I mean not fun. at all) I ironed the hems with that fancy iron tape stuff, but am going to have to go over them with the machine. The tatami room has a raised floor and the ironing tape hemmed curtains are measured to fit another room, so they are still too long & I’ll have to do them again. Re-doing stuff kills me…
So I guess all this curtain stuff looming over me makes me feel busy & the re-doing part kills my motivation. So really I guess I’ve just kinda been sitting around.
I’m on the hunt for a steam mop. I have alot of lino floors now. The butt crack about getting a steam mop is that they sell them in Japan for about 3 x the price they sell them for in the US… Do I ask my American friends to hook me up??
Also, I wanna chop all my hair off. Like this:

And hair grows back. But I just don’t know if it will suit me…
Anywho, not much crafty creative stuff going on with me at the mo. I need to get into the swing of Nakagawa life, get a cleaning/cooking/exercising groove going.
I write ‘so’ alot.

Or library toilet?? Hmmm.
Anyway. We have one. Jared came up with the grand idea. I’m so blessed to have a creative husband. I’m quirky. I’m weird. If he was too sensible it would be uncomfortable.
But yeah, so new apartment, different space & old furniture. Dilemma. We have new lights & curtains too, which again don’t mesh so well with the old stuff. Whilst trying to find homes for things (after a week of everything un-boxed but just lying around anxiously & very messily waiting) we got creative this evening. We decided to put the old DVD wall unit in the toilet room. It’s a BIG space for just a lavatory. So we set it up just to see & put my books in there. I love it! I just hope my books don’t get…. Stinky?? And there’s also a big shelf above the toilet. So now all our books live in there. The shelf unit is bright red & somehow our living room is leaning more towards beige & baby blue. It’s the curtains fault I think. We always had a dark brown, black & red trend before. New season! I’m not really a blue kinda person & especially baby blue, but I can work with it. I think we need a cool-colour rug next.
AND we just bought Winie a little ikea potty today & it’s red too. So the toilet room/space/library is rocking red.