Year 10 Japanese Class - Session 1

Yesterday I was lucky to be able to bring the craft of temari to 60 students at a Perth Secondary College.  I'm not sure if privacy allows me to mention the school by name, but here is a shout out to these students reading this blog. You all know who you are!!  I thought the classes were a blast. We got all of our bases made and hopefully the balls will be divided for homework and we'll be ready to stitch next week.

Regular readers may recall me mentioning the prospect of taking this class last year. At one point I had thought that we were jinxed because it had to be rescheduled twice, but now we have had our first of few sessions.  Next Monday we will have our second lesson where I will demonstrate the bi-coloured Kiku.

The pic above is a sample bowl of balls I took along for the classes.  I always take along lots of different styles and try to mix up the sizes too.  The largest ball in the bowl is a pattern I purchased from Barb Suess and always elicits the biggest wow from people who haven't seen temari before.  I can also see in the bottom of the bowl my take on a CHA Fujix ball pattern that Glenna Kipp deciphered - this pattern always gets people asking 'How did you do this?" I also took a small selection of books along for the class to flip through. These are probably actually my favorite 'this is temari and this is how you do it' books.

In this photo are the two best English language books on temari (IMHO). Barb's book is quite easy to get hold of  and the Wood book is harder to find but can be ordered through a good book store.  There is also a Cosmo book (#1 of 7 that we sell in our store) and a few other Japanese Language books (the two center books are currently out of print) and the mini book is not out of print but is hard to find... I think I got mine from an Etsy seller.

You can probably see the corner of the little baggies in the pic above. These contain samples of the core materials I use.  Rice hull (OF COURSE my FAV!!!), socks, drier lint and orts and sliced up fabric bits are all items that are inside the sample balls in the bowl.

.... and I think I can see some budding temari addicts.