Current Projects

Since I haven't written in a while I felt like I needed to do something. So I thought, well why not? I'll just give them a run down of current projects! So some things I have running now... Japanese class (of course) 3 hours a day, 5 days a week with the occasional Saturday culture class thrown in. These are only occasional because the teacher is actually a full time historian working at the Tokyo National Museum and teaches all us lovely exchange students on a volunteer basis. 

We learned about e-maki or scroll painting in the last one and about how they were the predecessors to modern manga. Yet another thing that Japan owes to China in the beginning but has made its own over the years (along with the kimono, ramen, kanji, Buddhism ... the list goes on.) But she brought in carbon paper and dollar store hanging scrolls and calligraphy sets for everyone to try their hands at Japanese painting. It's pretty hard don't get your hopes up for my skill, despite my long years of art class, I always did drawing and using a brush is a lot different from a pen or pencil.

Also in the works is a rabbit eared hat (blog address if you want to check her other stuff out) for a friend of mine who just moved north from warmer climes. This means that I now have no particularly good excuses to visit Florida, but can finally make her those cute fuzzy things she used to love when she lived outside the same town that I lived outside, albeit on different sides. So because I don't particularly care for the hat pattern that goes with the bunny ears, I decided to use M.K. Carroll's Top Down Ribbed Beanie instead.

A note on this hat: not only do I generally dislike using solid white yarn because it gets dirty easily and like solid black yarn the individual stitches are often hard to see, but this stuff is fuzzy. I don't know if I will ever knit anything fuzzy again in my life after this. I really dislike the fact that I can't see my stitches to see where I messed up when I end up with an odd number of stitches instead of an even number. Oh well, I'm trying. I made the hat way too big the first time around and took it out to try it smaller. If my luck holds out I'll end up with it being too small this time.  It looks a little like a squid at the moment because I have it bunched up on the needles so my stitches won't slid off while it's in the night stand drawer, but I think I'll be done with it in about 12 rows of ribbing.