Happy Easter!

We started off the day right with a call to Leiya. She sounds happy and I'm so glad that she is enjoying school life. What could be better than to be a student and enjoy going to school?

Then it was off to church and help the sunday school kids make Easter eggs. A few of us had made the hardboiled eggs and then the kids "wrapped" them in colorful shrinkable cellophane wrappers. Hmm. Not the traditional way to color Easter eggs, but since Easter isn't celebrated in Japan, even this was a fun project for the kids. The eggs were passed out to church members after the service.

And in honor of Easter, I'm posting a picture of a beautiful quilt done by my friend, Noriko Okutomi. Noriko, Mrs. Furui and I started doing patchwork together almost 20 years ago, and what started out as an English lesson (translating the "It's Okay If You Sit On My Quilt Book") turned into a patchwork gathering and all three of us began the adventure into doing pieceing by machine. Later Noriko moved to other parts of Japan but she visits about once a year and in the meantime has taught machine piecing, applique and quilting. She has been featured in some of the Japanese Quilting magazines as well as having a series of her quilts shown in a Japanese Christian magazine. Anyway, as you can see, her work is beautiful and she has made it her life work to depict scenes and verses from the Bible. This quilt is actually called the Annunciation, and it was exhibited at the 2005 Paduach Quilt Festival in Kentucky.