Komagane Craft Festival

Mikel and I went to Komagane on Sunday with our buddies Eric and Mai.  Every year there is an excellent craft festival by this beautiful river.  The crafts were so amazing!  Very chi-chi!  There were some things I had never seen before, like instruments made out of beautiful wood and paint cans, wool felted into silk fabric, kimono fabric scraps used for beading, etc!  I bought a pair of earrings.  They are large loops made of hammered sterling.  I will post the artists name later this week.  I left the info at home today.   

I also bought beautiful silk yarn made of many tiny strands of multi-colored thread.  I think I will do some embellishing with it.

Here I am by the pond, around which were many booths filled with fantastic crafts like crazy rainbow colored hats to elegant furniture made from wood and cement, toys, and a bird constructed out of old machine parts that really moved!  Why didn't we get a photo of that?

This is a dress made out of the fish windsocks for children's day in May.  I posted a picture in one of my May blogs of these fish hanging over the pond by our house (in case you forget what they look like in normal form.)  I love this dress!  Thanks to Mikel for helping me take the stealthy photo.  The dress was about $300, as was the reast of this artist's clothing.  The price was totally worth it!  Her craft and creativity is how she reconstructed different fabrics together was really genius.

On the way home, we stopped at a used kimono and antique shop.  I bought scraps of fabric from old kimonos.  It was fabric heaven.  My Grammy would love it there!  I'll post images of the fabric soon as well.

The weekend was punctuated by a major discussion that started yesterday after the mailman dropped off a packet of information about a graduate school in Vermont.  It started a train of thought about my life after Japan.  Should I concentrate more on painting and go to graduate school right away?  Should Beaded Weeds be a post-grad school plan?  Should I try for a fancy school like Columbia?  So many HUGE questions.  They may not seem like huge questions, but to me, they determine what I spend my time on here.  Lately I have been spending most of my art time working on Beaded Weeds.  I love it, but I feel a deeper love for my painting.  Beaded Weeds was originally started as a way for me to be self-employed, making money with my hands and allowing me lots of time to paint.  I am trying not to think in a polar way about this.  Nothing is ever all or none.  I will continue to do both.