mumbling with typhoon coming and staying ...

It was not very nice to have a typhoon hanging around for a week and finally the 12th typhoon (we don't name typhoons in Japan.  We just give them the ordinal numbers instead) is now almost at the edge of the one of the four main islands and moving northward VERY slowly.  It is said that the typhoon is similar in size to Irene which hit NYC and moving in the speed equivalent to jolly bicycle ride.  The news report said that some parts of the country got half the annual rain fall over the night.  The morning news was full of flood and landslide.  Fortunately for me, the area we live has not affected very much, so far.  It's just like a very windy day now but it's going to be very rough tonight.  It seems that the typhoon got slowed down further.  

The photo is my most recent thimble.  I have made two more in the same design but in different colours.  I like its blue and gray hue.  Since I do not dye my threads, I have to shop looking for the "right" colours.  The haberdashery I frequent only sells Fujix Tire silk thread but about a year ago I purchased other manufacturer's silk thread on-line as dead stock as they were out of business.  The brand name was Hyoutan and their colours are very delicate and in lovely hue as you can see in the picture.  It's quite a shame that they are no longer in the business.

As you may know I have listed Japanese cotton prints fabric at my Etsy shop and the listings will expire on 19th September and I am not going to re-list them.  If you ear-marked them for the future purchase, please have another look at them before the listing will be gone.

Speaking of Etsy, well, I am not very happy with some of the listings there.  It's about copyright infringement.  I switched from paper books to e-books years ago except the picture heavy crafts and cooking books and a few years ago something called "geographic restriction" was introduced in e-books market and you cannot buy certain books if your credit cards are not issued in the correct country.  It's about the publishers and/or writer's copyright.  The certain publishing house only bought the right to sell in the certain countries and if you do not have a credit card issued in that group of countries you are not entitled to buy it in e-book format while you are welcome to import the paper book published by the same publishing house.  It does not matter where you are currently living, it's the credit card which matters.  Weired.  I am not very happy about the situation and I do not fully understand or agree with their reasoning but I can accept it.  The writers' and publishers' rights have be protected after all.  What I am upset about is there are many of the sellers at Etsy who simply scan the paper books and sell it in JPEG or PDF format saying it's "e-books".  It's outright piracy.  What upsets me more is the fact that there have been many people who bought them.  It's quite easy to realize that the "book" was scanned manually because the listed photos of sample pages show the edges of the pages of the book or a trace of shadow which indicate that curved pages at the binding.  It's quite clear that the pages of the books are scanned and they chose to ignore the fact that they were buying the illegally copied books, or just don't care if it was a legitimate book or not as long as it was cheaper than buying from the bookshop.  I have reported several sellers but it's a up-hill battle.  Please pop in to Etsy and search for "ebook".  You would be amazed to find so many scanned PDF/JPEG files among the seller's original patterns and instructions.  When you add "Japanese", then the majority of the results would be piracy.  What the world has become ...