February is not too bad when ...

As mild as it is in Japan, February is still the coldest month. The day is getting longer and the sky looks (sometimes) cheerful and you can almost feel spring being there, and I am well aware that there are a lot of places where people are suffering from a very cold weather, including heavy snow, yet I feel cold down here.

In addition to my "seven days of specialness swap" earlier this month, I have got wonderful surprisings this month, too. The first one was from the last month's winner of Share Your Thimble photo sharing, Kat in Texas, also known as Shidepro. She sent me a box full of embroidery floss. When she responded to her winning notification she asked me if I was interested in trying out the bulky nylon thread she used. When mailman came to my door and handed me a box from overseas sometime later on Sunday morning, being Sunday means no mail delivery unless it's express service in Japan, I was puzzled. Surely I would remember if I bought something from overseas which comes by express airmail. Would I really? I knew I was expecting sample thread from Kat but surely it would be in a normal size envelope and not in a box. Oh, was I wrong. Inside the box there are beautifully carded thread, not only the bulky nylon, but Kat also gave me colourful samples of size 8 perle cotton.

I mentioned that I have never actually seen a size 8 floss, she kindly gave me an opportunity to try them out. The problem is, I am kind of a pack rat, stashing everything and not actually using them. I have pledged that I use (hopeful) many of my hoardings this year and actually make something using them (have you seen my pair of curtains in the last post? I am really proud of my self that I have been keeping my promise - so far), I might decide to use them. But you know, using up thread stash is difficult for me. They are beautiful as they are and I don't want to mess them up. I also have variegated floss from Julie as one of the 7 days swap. I am afraid my thread stash may not be reduced anytime soon.

Then the following day I received a lovely collection of sample floss from Kat, I got this from Jane. She created a fabric book back in last autumn, and each page of the book represented the alphabets. She chose a quilt for Q with nine patch quilt featured on the page and challenged her blog readers how many squares we could find in the page and luckily I won the prize. I have seen many temari before, all of them in the display case at the shops, but this is the first one I actually hold in my hand, let alone own it. For those of you who are not familiar with temari, it's a (obviously) ball; direct translation is a "hand ball", as opposed to a "foot ball". There was a foot ball game played by noblemen more than a thousand years or so ago but the game and the ball were not the one we are familiar with today, not soccer, rugby, or American football. Temari has gone back to a few hundred years I believe and made of a fabric/paper/thread core ball covered by thread wrapped around to form a sphere then embroidered on a surface. Not very bouncing but it was a girls' indoor toy. Today, nobody actually play with them but to display and admire its beauty. I admire mine everyday.

February is not bad at all, not at all, in deed.