ARTery

From the second class got out on Friday, this has been a wonderful weekend for arting :D

During the school festival, AJ and I visited the Ikebana club in the meeting room next to the teacher's office. Apparently my predecessor had gone to their after-school sessions last year, so the instructor had asked AJ to introduce me to her and see if I was interested. Of course, the instructor is an impeccably polite, darling old Japanese woman. And you just don't refuse impeccably polite, darling old Japanese women. It is plain and simply impossible.

Thus, on Friday afternoon around 3:30 I was up on the 4th floor in a cozy little traditional tatami room I had never known existed before that day, sticking flowers in decorative ceramic holders and hoping I was doing it right. The instructor dutifully praised my first efforts, and then added a few more cuttings & rearranged the others a bit to make it look up to standard. This is exactly the kind of reaction I had been expecting, so I took it to mean that I wasn't completely hopeless but could learn a lot from watching her fix my fumbles. But she also actually went out of her way to remark on my sense of balance to another teacher who came up to chat, and that I consider a bit unusal even taking into account the extra politeness afforded to me as a new class member and a foreigner. So here's the arrangement that got me started on the right foot (or right flower, as it were):On Saturday, I took a train into Mie's capital, Tsu, to meet up with several other JETs for a Stitch'n'Bitch. We gathered in the Mr. Donuts store right next to the train station, scarfed down delicious pastries, sewed and knitted and crocheted, and talked some trash about whatever was bugging us at the mo'. That is, in a nutshell, one of many possible iterations of a Stitch'n'Bitch, and if you are at all inclined to either passtime, I suggest you see if there is a venue for crafty crafters & sharp-tongued wits in your area :3 I made some progress on an anteater stuffie pattern I'm trying to put together. Sorry, no photos yet; it's under wraps until I can get the whole thing assembled and draw up a proper pattern to share with the world.

After Stitch'n'Bitch was done, me and a couple of the JETs from Iga (birthplace of the ninja! Man, my prefecture rocks so hard) went further north to the town of Komono, where we dined at a family restaurant inexplicably called "Tom Sawyer" and went to bed early to rest up for the town's half-marathon.

No, I didn't run. But I DID paint the faces of just about every child in the area. The lovely lady JET who works as Komono's coordinator of international relations (CIR) was running a face-painting table for one of her favorite charities; we asked for a 100-yen donation from people in exchange for our artistic services. I had volunteered via e-mail to help out, because it sounded like tons of fun.

Once word got out amongst the girls that I did Disney characters, though, it became like an assembly-line of bright, smiling faces all begging to have Stitch painted onto their left cheeks. I was moving too fast to stop and take pictures myself (sorry, Jenni! I know you would have been so proud of me!), but I think maybe one of the other JETs working the table snapped a few photos during the lull in her commissions (I felt really guilty at times, like I was hogging all the adorable kids, I consoled myself with the fact that I got a metric ass-ton of moms to toss in their 100-yen coins for our charitable cause) Here's a group project I did for four girls who wanted matching flowers on their legs:
And the best part about this weekend is that it continues through tomorrow. Yay Health & Sports Day! . . . Ironically I will probably spend most of it in bed. But I feel entitled to that, really, after running around all weekend, and the weather has turned cool again so it's going to be great day to lay around & do nothing more physically taxing than putting a needle & thread through felt or pencil to paper.