Bonne Année!

あけましておめでとうございます。

Happy New Year!

My babies are back!

My Twelve by Twelve Theme Series quilts arrived back home from their journey around the world. They are in very good shape. It's hard to believe they travelled for several years.
A big thank you to the Twelves for this great adventure!

Wagashi

As you know, the theme for this new Twelve by Twelve challenge was "Sweet".
Wagashi are Japanese sweets and I just love them. They are sweet, of course, and so beautiful. If you've never seen any, you have to do an image search in google, and you will see how pretty they are, almost too pretty to eat!
Actually "wa" means "Japanese-style" and "kashi" means "confectionery". Together they become "wagashi".
One of the big challenges in learning Japanese is to master the writing system. I now know my hiragana and katakana pretty well. But of course I am only starting to study kanji.
Anyway, for this quilt, I decided to print some fabric with the word wagashi written in hiragana:
わがし
I tried lots of things, made many test prints, and finally settled on using only the hiragana わ (wa). By the way, "wa" means "Japanese-style", but it also means "peace" and "harmony".

The flavours and shapes of wagashi are often inspired by seasons and flowers. This is why I added this sakura on my quilt.

Here's another close-up.

And now I'm off to the Twelve by Twelve blog to see what my sweet friends have done for this last challenge of the series.

First snow

We had our first snow yesterday night. Not much, but enough to make the roads a bit slippery, especially this morning.
I did some more calligraphy exercises the other day. I'm using Japanese brushes and sumi (ink).

The idea was to use these as designs for screenprinting. First I made a very small screen. I wanted to see how well this ink is burning the plastic coating of the mesh.

Then I prepared some larger screens. This is some test printing using fabric paint.

Now, I need to print more fabric.