Zhinka dinka doo

Blessings

Last week I returned home to a box outside my door (love boxes!). Because all boxes are Max's (or so he thinks), we opened it together to find these amazing goodies inside. They were from the lovely and super sweet Debbie of puanani.

There were so many wonderful things. A beautiful and really colorful koi nobori for Max for children's day. Max also got a great book about seasons in Hawaii and a fun card.

There are two amazing Hawaiian cookbooks: What Hawaii Likes to Eat and Best of the Best from Hawaii Cookbook. I had seen "What Hawaii..." on her blog a while back and had asked about it (repeatedly, but only because my browser wasn't working, really), so imagine my surprise when it showed up at my house, and brought a friend too!

I spent a wonderful month in Hawaii when I was in grad school, as part of my research. It was quite an amazing time. The people, the land, the weather, the food were all indescribable. I came back from my adventure with one tiny pamphlet cookbook that I got at the Bishop Museum, and ever since I've regretted not getting something more substantial. But now I have the opposite problem: there are so many tempting recipes, I don't know where to start!

I'll have to work on that. In the meantime and to distract me from my indecision, there's a wonderful Hawaiian quilt kit. Have you seen Hawaiian quilts? So beautiful. A kit is perfect for me. And it's in blue, Max's favorite color!

To top it all off, there was a lovely bag of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, which my hubby thinks are his. I'll probably give him a few :)

I've "met" some really wonderful people through blogging. Debbie and I have never met in person, but I do feel like I know her almost as well as I know the people in my sewing group. I feel truly blessed to have wonderful bloggy friends and local friends in my life. Thank you, and mahalo!

Children's Day

First: thank you all for the birthday wishes earlier this week! It was so nice to open my email to all your wonderful notes!

Now, continuing on. This Monday was Children's Day in Japan. We had a celebration at Max's school. I dressed in a kimono that I got from a friend. We brought in a koi nobori that we received from the wonderfully generous Debbie (more on this later), along with irises both real and paper, fusen (origami paper balloons), origami kabuto (Max calls them Viking helmets, I call them samurai helmets), and rice-based treats.

Max has been practicing his origami tecniques for a week and has made about 20 kabutos. We brought in extra paper and he sat down to teach classmates how to fold the kabuto.

The rice treats were yaki onigiri and mochi crackers. The mochi crackers were made from store-bought dry mochi cakes (I used these, the Super Seed variety), sliced into thin little bits and baked at 450 for about 5-10 minutes. They're cracker-like but with an interesting chewy texture.

While these were both good, I had spent the weekend attempting a different snack, mochi (the soft, fresh kind). I tried making it with mochiko (sweet glutinous rice flour), but my mochiko was quite old and I'm not certain it was the right kind. I usually get a certain brand, but I had gone to our local (and now defunct) asian grocery where the woman there assured me that this was the same stuff. After trying it, I'm not convinced. They were inedible and so were tossed. Next I tried making mochi from actual sweet glutinous rice grains, not the flour. I soaked, drained, steamed. The next step is to pound the cooked rice with mallets, but since our mallets are all out for repair, I tried kneading it in the bread machine (something I read online, but I can't find it now). After a long time of waiting and resetting the machine to knead some more, it made a dough that is reminiscent of mochi, but is not really mochi. For the children's day party I finally gave up, but I want to try this again and see if I can get it to work better now that I have more time.

Still life with pancake

Dora yaki that I made for the Children's Day party that was postponed from last weekend and finally held today. Homemade an (red bean paste) between pancakes. I like these almost as much as mochi. I guess you wrap anything around sweet red bean paste, and I'll like it.

We had dora yaki, mochi, curry rice, tazukuri, and a bunch of other things. The t-shirt stencil activity went great, although I was too busy helping to get pictures. The kids had tons of fun playing all sorts of games of their own making.

And one of our friends brought his wide-format camera, some polaroid film for it, and let the kids take pictures of each other. This was a huge hit with the kids, but unfortunately Max refused to allow his picture to be taken. Here he is investigating.

About 5 minutes after the last guest left, I fell asleep and woke up 2 hours later to a doorbell. I'm now sitting in front of the TV catching up on old Stargate episodes. And then I'll go to sleep.

Koi nobori stencil: test t-shirt results

Today we tried painting the koi stencils onto one of the t-shirts, and were generally successful. We used Amy's suggestion of putting another piece of freezer paper behind the stencil to keep it stable and to prevent the paint from going through. That seemed to work nicely. I wasn't sure when to remove the top freezer paper, should I take it off right away, or let the paint completely dry first? I decided to let it dry a little and then remove the freezer paper. This seemed to work ok. One note though, do not remove the back freezer paper until the paint is completely dry or it can do weird things to the front design, like the little line to the right of the koi's eye in the second photo below.

Above is Max carefully painting on the stencil. Below is the mostly finished t-shirt, this one's for Grandpa. I wanted to have Max sign it, and I was going to print "Children's Day 2007" around the koi, but the only fabric marker I have is red and that disappears into the navy blue. I could get a lighter color pen, but I suspect that all will just disappear too, so perhaps this t-shirt is done...

I'm glad we got a chance to test this out before just doing it as an activity. The painting used a lot more paint than I thought it would, so I wouldn't have had enough for everyone to paint their shirts.

The stencil is here (467.5K), if you'd like to use it (personal, non-commercial use only). I printed it so the longest dimension was about 9.5 or 10 inches, this fills the front of a child-sized t-shirt. About 7 inches across is good for babies' onesies. I printed these directly onto freezer paper, but you can also print onto plain paper and tape that over the freezer paper while cutting the two together.

Kodomo no hi prep

This Saturday is Children's Day, kodomo no hi, a holiday in Japan (or Boy's Day, if you're old school about it). We're doing a big party at our house, in parts because (1) parties are fun, (2) I'm half Japanese and I want Max to learn something about other cultures, (3) it's about Max's 6-month mark between birthdays, and (4) my birthday is the next day, and it's nice to have a party but I'm not all that fond of specifically-targeted birthday parties once I passed 30 or so.

I'm planning several crafts projects for the kids, but haven't had time to get one of them off the ground. Unfortunately, it's my favorite of the three I've planned. But now I have a reprieve of sorts, although not a welcome one. We've just decided to postpone the party until next weekend because Max has a cold. Nothing major, just sniffles, a low grade fever, and general lethargy. I'm afraid I may be getting it too, so I'm heavy into rest and vitamins right now.

The picture above is one of the party crafts, freezer paper stencils for the kids to paint onto t-shirts. I sketched a stylized koi nobori (koi streamer or windsock), stencil-ized it, coaxed my ancient inkjet to print a dozen of them, and am now cutting out the relevant pieces. And pieces of my fingers occasionally too. When my fingers and sharp implements get close together, there's often blood. It's pretty sad, I need to figure out how not to cut off my digits.

Since I have more time now, I'm going to stop cutting the stencils and test one of these out on an actual t-shirt. I hope to have pictures of that sometime this weekend.

In the meantime, happy Children's Day! May your children be happy and grow strong and healthy!

Koi nobori lino print

Here's part of the invitation for our upcoming Children's Day party. Koi nobori (carp streamer/kite), happily flying in the breeze. Max helped to make these by sponge-painting the blue/white background, and helping with the block printing.

I love koi nobori, what's not to love about kites? I'm planning one, maybe two koi-themed crafts for the party. Off to work on those next.

If you'd like to send a happy koi card to someone for Children's day, a few extra are here.

Update: I had to add a footnote to this post, after reading Alison's post about her son Max who loves to paint himself. As my Max would say, "the entire self of him". Mine is completely against things touching him, be they paint, glue, dough, etc. For many art projects, he spends much of the time picking dried glue off his fingers. Apparently paint involved in sponge painting is different. It's ok if this kind of paint touches his fingers. Max helped with the sponge painting of the light blue backgrounds of these cards. The paint gets all into the sponge and then seeps out and touches your fingers. His response: "that's ok if it gets on my fingers." Good. And we had fun. And I think he's a wonderful sponge painter!

Happy boy's day!

Boy's day was Friday (the fifth day of the fifth month), but we had our party on Saturday. I always want to do a kid's craft at Max's parties, and so far have made plans but never actually executed them. Because kids are always running left and right at speeds approaching that of light, and getting them to slow down enough to do a craft seemed futile. This time I was determined, so I prepared a simplified koinobori (carp streamer) activity. (I love koinobori.) I enlisted Max to help me test the activity and he really liked it, I think that helped it go over better. Here are some of the finished fish flags, drying outside during the party:

We made these using the gyotaku technique--fish printing. Traditionally done by painting a real fish (in order to record its size), we instead used rubber fish from Dick Blick. Unfortunately they didn't have carp/koi, so we used a perch (it looked the most koi-like of the options) and a trout (for a local flair). Here Max is determinately painting his perch:

You can see the finished trout flag on the table above the perch. After painting the fish, we took a pre-hemmed flag and put it face down on the painted fish, then pushed all over to get the imprint. Then just hang up to dry. This activity went well with all the guests except for the almost 2-year-old, who was uninterested in rubber fish. He started twice and left each for his mom to finish. The 3- and 4-year-olds really got into this activity. Just enough mess, lots of room for creativity (combining various colors on the fish). Rather than trying to get everyone to gather around a craft all at once, my approach was to pick out one child at a time, whoever seemed most receptive.

I made the flags out of white cotton fabric that I then dyed using the natural food dyes used for Easter eggs. After making the blue cabbage dye, I've been eagerly soaking various things in it. String, fabric, yarn is next. I also made up a batch of pink beet dye, and the two together make lavender (although mine is more like a different shade of pink, I think it needed more time in the blue). I love the soft shading that I get with this method. After each piece of fabric was dyed and dried, I cut and serged the edges, then sewed a pocket at the top. After the fish was printed on the flag, we inserted cut-to-size straws into the pocket, and threaded ribbon through each for hanging. The straw lets the top of the flag lay straight and not bunch up.

Here are my dyed fabrics drying outside. From top to bottom, they're lavender, blue, and pink; all very light shades that were perfect for this activity:

And finally, here's a pic of some of the party guests, out in the backyard, doing something in the garden:

Coming soon: pictures of the goodness I received in the mail yesterday!