Moving a Bit

Hello everyone!
I will be moving my posts about Japanese things to a different address. I will write a blog about a lot of Japanese things, so if you're interested - take a look!
I will be writing about Japanese hobbies, Japanese movies, Japanese artists, Japanese books etc. etc.
Hope to see you there!

xx, Emma

World of Manga

Last weekend B and I went to a great manga exhibition in Rotterdam called World of Manga. We saw lots of manga and anime we'd never heard of before and the drawings were absolutely amazing. I was allowed to take pictures, but I didn't take a lot, because every drawing/painting looked so amazing that I couldn't really choose drawings to take pictures of and decided to just look at them. Here are some pictures of the exhibition.

By Shiho Enta

By Shiho Enta

Street Fighter character

Street Fighter character

By Huang Nguyen and Shiho Enta

By Huang Nguyen

By Shiho Enta

I'm thinking of going again, it was such a great exhibition. There was another artist who is really really amazing, but I didn't take any pictures of her art. I did buy some post cards with her drawings on them. Here they are.

Postcards with manga art by Fuzichoco

By Fuzichoco

By Fuzichoco

In the museum shop they had a beautiful scarf with this print (above) on it. Unfortunately...it was a bit too expensive...

By Fuzichoco

This was the picture they printed in the newspaper in the article about World of Manga.

It was so much fun! I want to go again..!

Origami

Today was open origami day at 't Japanse Winkeltje (the Japanese shop)! I went there and two little American boys taught us how to fold origami cranes and lots more. Unfortunately, I wasn't there at the beginning and I couldn't stay till the end, so I only folded a crane...which was actually why I went there.

Below are a few pictures of the origami the two boys made.

A cute little origami fox

I'm not sure what exactly this is, but it looks pretty

I love the paper used for the ball end the red lizard

Origami cranes

Origami lotus flower (this one was taught at the beginning)

This is my crane. When I came home I practiced making origami cranes and I tried to make an origami koi carp. 

I wore my crane dress to the open origami day

This is my first crane (folded at the open origami day)

My second

My third

My fourth

And my fifth

They say that if you fold a thousand origami cranes you'll have everlasting luck. Maybe I'll give it a try...

Here you see all the cranes and the koi carp I've folded today

Tomorrow I'll post a 'how to fold an origami crane' so you can make your own!

And I found these amazing Kanji books if anyone is interested. They're in Japanese, absolutely no English, but they're for Japanese kids in elementary school, so very easy to understand! The title of the first book is 'Kanji no Hon Ichi Nen Sei' (it means, kanji book 1st year).

Mata ne! (See you soon!)

Pretty Little London Update III

I did some more stitching today, and - hurrah! - Big Ben is done! ^_^
I really really enjoy stitching this piece. Don't know if it's because I haven't stitched for so long or because I love England so much or because I just really like stitching a very cute and colourful piece.

Big Ben

I really like the Big Ben. Not as much as the real one of course.

What I've done so far

Mum is going to a birthday party of a friend of hers tomorrow, so she decided to bake a cake. She asked me to make some roses. I think this chocolate cake looks absolutely scrumptious! Although the white roses remind me of a wedding, not a birthday. Oh well.

Game of Thrones: the Exhibition

A colleague (and now friend) of mine and I are reading the same series of books; A Song of Ice and Fire (also known as A Game of Thrones).

When we heard about Game of Thrones: the Exhibition, we decided to go. What we didn't know is that we had to stand in line for like an hour and only had about fifteen minutes to actually see the exhibition. Anyway, we were brave and stood in line in the cold (this was at the end of May) for about an hour and went in.

Here are some pictures of the exhibition.

Jon Snow's outfit

One of Daenerys Targaryen's dragons

Two of Daenerys Targaryen's dragon eggs

I was a bit confused, because Daenerys Targaryen gets three dragon eggs when she marries Khal Drogo. I thought 'where is the third one?' My friend told me that they gave George R.R. Martin (the writer of the books) one of the eggs as a wedding present. Makes sense.

Daenerys Targaryen's outfits

My friend shooting an arrow

Me shooting an arrow

And finally, me sitting on the Iron Throne

Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of my friend on the throne. Oh, and the throne was made of plastic and creaking eerily whenever someone sat down on it...

Think I'm going to go back to my book. I'm currently reading the third book (A Storm of Swords) and my friend is already reading the fourth (A Feast for Crows)! I need to hurry!

Pretty Little London Update II

I finally made some time to do some stitching.
Here is what I've done so far.

Tower Bridge is nearly done and so is the Big Ben. I wanted to finish the Big Ben today, but my thumb was kind of cramping and I was getting sleepy, so I decided not to. I did one tiny little square of pink on the clock bit of Big Ben.

Here are some cat pictures. They're so cute and I haven't posted pictures of them for so long, so I thought it would be nice to post some. They've just had a dental operation, poor cats.

Bouchra

Close up of Bouchra's eyes

Close up of Bailey's face

Bailey

Bouchra's paw

I always want to gently squeeze the little cushy things in the bottom of their paws. Why is it they don't like that?!

Cute Obentou! かわいいお弁当

Another post that has nothing to do with stitching...sorry guys... This one is about a workshop I went to with a friend of mine this weekend. It was so much fun!

We went to a Japanese shop called Roppongi (www.roppongi.nl, one of my favourite shops - maybe even my favourite shop - in Amsterdam) to participate in a workshop cute obento. Obento is a Japanese style lunch box, usually with cute characters made of rice and vegetables.

This is the Japanese style lunch box we were going to make, this was the example our teacher made before the workshop started. Our teacher - or better, sensei - is called Noriko. Noriko-sensei's cute lunch box looks so cute and so pretty!

We all got a cutting board, a knife, a picture of Hello Kitty and ingredients - of course.

We had to take some sushi rice, wrap it in plastic and make a ball. Here I'm trying to make a Hello Kitty shape from my round rice ball.

And hurrah! I've made Hello Kitty's head! We used unboiled beans for her eyes.

I'm not going to go through all the stept of the workshop - I think that would be quite boring - so here you see what my finished bento box looks like. It's got a rice ball in it, carrots, broccoli, tomato, ham, corn, sausage, omelette and a bit of seaweed in it. I have to say, that I'm quite happy with the way my cute obento turned out!

Enjoy! Or, 'itadakimaaaaaaasu!' (いただきま〜す！) in Japanese. The woman who owns the shop gave us both a can of Dragon Ball Z soft drink, because there was a misunderstanding about the starting time of the workshop. The obento and the softdrink were very nice! I really enjoyed making it and eating and drinking it!

My friend and me in the shop, after finish making our obento. It was very nice, thank you very much for teaching us, Noriko-san!

My obento

My friend's obento