Let's make happy
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Oops
Jun 8th
Today I discovered an incorrect link in the Gallery section of Mochimochi Land! I thought I had been directing people to the Mochimochi Friends Flickr group, where everyone (including you!) can share photos of toys they’ve knitted from Mochimochi Land patterns, but it turns out that it was the wrong link all this time.
There I was, with about 7 members of my extended family gathered around the computer. I clicked on the link to show them the great photos people had taken, and I clicked, then clicked again, and well, it was just a little embarrassing.
But now the link is fixed! So hopefully even more people will check out the great photos and add more of their own. For example, who knows how many people have missed seeing this funny photo by Mikkers:
Her Grass wishes he were cabbage. Or maybe he’s trying to disguise himself. Either way, it’s super-cute.
So if you have a Mochimochi Land toy you’d like to share, please join the group!
Another Terrible Organic Food Product
Jun 8th
I didn’t mean to write a “worst of” series of Whole Foods purchases, but I feel obligated to warn against this mistake before others make it:
I’m not a picky eater, especially not when it comes to salads. I can be pretty forgiving, because really, what is it? Usually fresh greens and other, more colorful vegetables, with something tangy drizzled on top. Even the worst salad – iceberg lettuce, say, and too much ranch dressing – is completely fine with me. So when a dressing makes a salad inedible, it’s a real shame.
The above pictured dressing is so bad, we had to throw out the better part of an otherwise yummy tofu salad. The flavor had nothing to do with shitake (which I love) or sesame (which I also love), but instead was like something made from a powder for diabetics or astronauts. It tasted like the dressing McDonald’s would come up with if it were folly enough to try to make a sodium-free, sucrose-free, fat-free, “organic” dressing substitute. But McDonald’s is much smarter than that. (And this dressing wasn’t fat free, amazingly enough.)
So that’s one less bottle of dressing you’ll have to choose among next time you’re at Whole Foods. But shouldn’t we be making our own dressings ourselves? It seems like one of those things that’s easy to do, but I never get around to remembering how for long enough to actually make it….
Bob Update
Jun 6th
Do you remember Bob? Bob remembers you!
Bob, who was christened by you wonderful readers, will be the next free Mochimochi Land pattern. He or she is coming very soon, but in the meantime, I thought I’d share a sneak peek at the new and improved Bob:
The changes are subtle- I just plumped her up a bit and made the tail part of the main knitting, instead of a separate piece. And the snout is a bit shorter now.
Check back soon to learn how to knit a Bob of your own!
Sleepy Snake & Mischievous Mouse are here!
Jun 5th
O frabjous day!
The pattern for Sleepy Snake & Mischievous Mouse is now in the Mochimochi Shop!
This is the first interactive toy in Mochimochi Land – Mischievous Mouse can crawl into Sleepy Snake’s belly, and back out again. (Don’t try this at home, all you naughty mice!)
A-L-S-O, today is the debut of our new shopping cart system in the shop! We hope it will make buying Mochimochi Land patterns more fun and easy for all of us.
Ikebana Is Awesome
Jun 4th
This weekend I pulled out some of my old ikebana magazines to show to a friend, and I fell in love with it all over again.
From The Ikenobo (No. 403)
If you’re not familiar, ikebana is the traditional art of Japanese flower arrangement.
Like many of the traditional arts in Japan (calligraphy, tea ceremony, kimono putting-on), ikebana is compelling in its beauty and profound simplicity and its design that is surprisingly modern-looking to Western-trained eyes.
From ikenobo ikebana (Senei Ikenobo, 1982)
An arrangement is meant to capture the essence of a particular flower, and, ultimately, of nature itself. At the same time, as a work of art, an arrangement is acknowledged as an artifice. In order to capture the essence of a flower in ikebana, sometimes you have to bend or break stalks, insert wires, or even add obviously “unnatural” elements like plastic.
From The Ikenobo (No. 403)
There are many different schools of ikebana, and different styles within those schools. The last time I was in Japan, I studied the Ikenobo school of ikebana. My sensei was very nice, but very disciplined – for some arrangements, she would show me a diagram of exactly how each leaf should be placed, and at what angle. (These were the “shoka” arrangements, for which there are crazy-strict rules for each different type of flower.)
From ikenobo ikebana (Senei Ikenobo, 1982)
Then there was “freestyle” arrangement. For this, my sensei would give me a bunch of flowers and tell me to do whatever I liked with them. Then, when I finished arranging them, she would pull them all out and show me how I should have arranged them. It was my own weekly Karate Kid experience, which I loved.
Here is one arrangement I did that I particularly liked (I believe it was shoka) – the flowers bloomed over the course of a week or so after I took it home:
Looking again at all this gorgeousness, I feel that it’s time to finally pursue some lessons in New York. I’ll have new photos to share if so. In the meantime, you can see more ikebana here.
