Tea Ceremony: Live and in Books

This past Saturday, I filled in for one of my coworkers as the narrator (or commentator, as they seem to have listed me in the program) for a tea ceremony demonstration. Our department cosponsors this event with the university gardens every year in honor of the height of cherry blossom season. The ladies from the [...]

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Green Bamboo Tin

Here’s another tea tin from the bunch I decorated over the winter. I really like the bamboo-leaf patterned paper.

It struck me as a nice spring-y tin, after the last tea tin post’s autumn theme.

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Happy Birthday to Me!

Today is my birthday! One of the highlights of birthdays in our family is getting our annual birthday cards from Ray & Anita, my aunt-and-uncle pair in New Jersey. Ray does calligraphy and Anita does a lot of card-making and scrapbooking. Here’s my card for this year:

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Five Years Ago

I’m in the process of moving my Japan blog over from Blogger to WordPress. Since I originally wrote it on the very old version of Blogger, WordPress’s magic import feature didn’t work, so I’m having to transfer things over one post at a time, cutting and pasting manually. This has given me a chance to [...]

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Temari Ball: Swirl

As I promised at the end of my last temari post, the next ball I’ve almost completed now is the Swirl Ball. Due to a bizarre story about another temari person trying to insist that they can copyright a stitching technique, Barb has never written down the instructions for the way she marks this ball, [...]

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Feminism vs. Ceremony

For obvious reasons, I’ve found myself with a need to think about weddings lately. I’m not particularly interested in going into all the little details of my own wedding planning, and I doubt you are either; instead, I’m talking about weddings in the abstract.
I was reading something on Pandagon a while ago, (a couple weeks [...]

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Burnt Orange Fall Leaves

It’s been a while since I posted about making tea tins. I made a bunch this winter of the collage type after getting some interesting and inspiring potluck packs of paper from Gallery Shibui.
I was particularly pleased with this one. The extreme thinness of the green paper with the gold and silver inclusions allowed it [...]

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Six degrees of Gary Gygax

For anyone who missed seeing any kind of news media yesterday, Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG system, died. While I never played D&D, I of course know many people who did/do, and I found it somewhat startling to realize that I am very few degrees removed from actually knowing Gygax.
My [...]

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Temari Class: Maritime Stars

I spent pretty much all day Saturday at a temari class. I have been delinquent in explaining this new hobby of mine on my blog, so first, some background. Last fall, my mom and I went to a demonstration and talk by the author of a new book our local bookstore was promoting, Japanese Temari: [...]

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Interesting Study Abroad Research

Lest it seem like my entire time in DC was devoted solely to seeing friends and shopping, I will now talk a bit about the actual conference. My boss and I were attending the International Education Programs Services (IEPS) International Education Forum, which is run by the governmental organization that runs Title VI programs and [...]

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