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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Last week my darling mother-in-law asked me to get her this book from Amazon Japan.
A book about John Lennon’s sweaters? No. A book about how to make the sweaters that John Lennon wore? No again. This is a book of knitting patterns for sweaters inspired by John Lennon songs. I believe my mom-in-law saw it on Little Purl of the Orient (at least that’s the only place on the web I found it mentioned and pictured), and just had to have one of her own. So I ordered it from an out-of-print books dealer and now it’s mine to leaf through until we see her again.
I’m all for pseudo-hippy, new-agey, inspirational knitting books, but this one is really an unfortunate cringe-worthy cheesefest. Most of the book, which was published in 1998 by Nihon Vogue, features photos of mediocre ’90s sweaters draped over stage-y recording equipment and guitars. It all looks like it was shot on the set of a ’90s sitcom about a recording studio and the quirky-but-lovable characters who work there.
(BTW this is one of the better sweaters.)
These works of art are interspersed with lyrics from classic Lennon songs and a timeline of John’s and Yoko’s “Love & Peace” activism. To be fair, some of the sweaters are actually quite knit-worthy, but they’re more Yale Club than Bed-in. And the only sweater we see John Lennon wearing in the whole book is the one on the cover.
The greatest slice of kitsch comes on the very last page – an ad for limited-edition John Lennon yarn wrappers by Olympus yarn. (I wish I could share an image of this, but my scanner is giving me trouble.) Anyone who can procure one of these skeins wins astronomical cool points.
John and I went to take a walk in the Central Park yesterday and this little phone followed us home.
OK, it didn’t actually follow us home, but it was all alone on the path, without an owner in sight. We found it on the east side of the park, somewhere near 72nd Street.
The batteries are running low, so it keeps turning off after a few seconds of turning it on – getting any information from it is a desperate task that makes us feel like we’re in an episode of 24. This sensation is further exacerbated by the way that the phone insists on playing a 5-second ad every time you turn it on. It’s super annoying – don’t get this phone if you haven’t already.
In several very hurried sessions of turning the phone on before it shuts off, John has managed to get the number of the phone (he left a message in case the owner checks his or her voice mail), the number of a friend in the contacts list, and the number listed under “home.” So far, neither the owner nor her good friend nor whoever is at home seems to care about this phone.
We’ve considered returning the phone to a Verizon store, but John thinks they would rather see the owner buy a new phone than see this one returned. So if this is your phone, come and get it! We have enough phones as it is.
Last week I managed to drop in at the Devilrobots show at The Showroom NYC.
But first, I encountered this flood:
It seemed that some kind of water pipe had burst at 7th and 2nd avenue. A couple dozen people were stranded on the curbs, alternately staring dumbly at the gushing water and snapping photos for their blogs. Eventually, the police showed up, then the fire department. But by that time, I had retraced my steps and crossed the street to get to the other side and back across to my destination.
OK, now some photos from the show.
A boy who wants to be a dinosaur and his dinosaur costume. (It must get hot in there!)
A sweet little penguin.
Giant, giant tofu.
This is my fave – a kind of Tofuman house with other Tofumen living inside. It reminds me of this plastic treehouse toy I had when I was little:
Someone recently reminded me that I had promised to knit a giraffe.
So here is my giraffe:
A version with a few (white) spots is in the works. But I actually like the simplicity of this version, even if it would be teased by any real giraffe that came its way. Poor little spotless giraffe!
This toy also gave me the opportunity to do a little “hair” embellishment that seemed somewhat vintage to me, though maybe it’s still often used and I just haven’t noticed it.
By the way, the books in the photos have been sitting in these piles for weeks, waiting to be taken to the Salvation Army. Of those pictured, I recommend The Alienist and The Blind Assassin (actually barely cropped out of the pictures) as good summer reads.
Yes, Rainycloud and his Rainydrop babies have been added to the Mochimochi Shop!
It’s an easy knit that looks downright cheery when hung on a wall.
This post is a reminder to everyone not to be fooled by pretty packaging.
I picked up this little number the other day in our downstairs convenience store because of its matte, minty-green wrapper, its eco-friendly aura, and because I was hungry.
I don’t claim to be an energy bar connoisseur, but this had to be the worst thing I had tasted in a long time. It tasted like someone had taken the fig filling from of a Fig Newton and left it out to dry in the sun for a couple days, then marinated it overnight in alfalfa sprout juice, then sprinkled it with mild onion powder, then added molasses so that they could call it “chocolate chip”. And it got turned completely black somewhere along the way too. But you’ll notice on the package that not one drop of gluten went into the making of this energy bar – THANK GOD. (By the way, I just found the wrapper again in the trash and looked over the real ingredients – they’re way worse than my make-em-up scenario, if you can believe that. But hey, no gluten!)
I’ll never make that mistake again. If I can convince just one other person to never try this energy bar, then it will all have been worth it.
Now here is a bar that I can really get behind:
Maybe the Nature’s Path Granola Bar isn’t an “energy bar” in the purest sense, but unlike the aforementioned scam, it’s edible. And you’ll notice that this one is wheat free. Thank God.