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Ramie Red
This week has been a unexpected color adventure from one weedy plant – ramie. Ramie is a fiber plant called karamushi in Japanese and also called “false nettle” in English. (It’s in a completely different botanical family than the stinging nettles that produce linen.) Ramie’s been grown for 6000 years in Asia. It makes smooth…
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Camera Roll
Summer has flown by in a haze of herniated disc pain and heat exhaustion, both of which are finally subsiding. Despite being housebound for most of two months, I captured some of the beauty in my world. Let me share it with you via all the Instagram Stories I’ve posted.
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Charcoal for Art
Some years ago, I learned how to make charcoal for biochar by building up a fire, then adding bamboo and covering it to expose the bamboo to heat without giving it air. In an hour there was charcoal. Looking for ways to share botanical resources as art supplies, I decided to try charcoal-making at home.…
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Surprises in the Overgrowth
This Mountain Day morning, I decided to take my coffee outside and walk around 555. We’ve had a couple days of windy rain and I wanted to pick up any fallen branches in the driveway. A small daily joy is to wander around in my nightgown and garden boots. I am definitely a member of…
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Kozuka Art Festival 2025
I feared my offering would be a failure. I had concerns about getting to the venue safely. I was worried that my poor Japanese would be a burden for everyone. I was intimidated by comparing myself to the other artists. I was sure that I’d be a punk misfit in a mix of hippies. Only…
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Summer Attractions
Summer in Japan is full of festivals and events. I feel like a sweaty social butterfly. Kamogawa Citizen’s Fireworks Although we’ve lived in Kamogawa for a decade, this is the first time we’ve taken in the beach fireworks. They were quite spectacular – lots of multicolored rainbow explosions reflecting on the water and waves. We…
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Mediatinker is 25 years old
A quarter of a century ago, I wrote my first blog post back when Mediatinker was an experiment hosted on Blogger. Today’s Weather in Tokyo: hot and humid. (It is summer after all!) It was quickly followed by a second post where I described the state of my urban garden. And here I am a…
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Fresh Indigo Blue
Yesterday, the Cotton & Indigo Trust gathered at Oyama Senmaida for summer gardening and our first dye harvest. The indigo is thriving! The seedlings we planted have bushed out. The cotton has been attacked by insects and weeds, but there are a few flowers here and there. It’s backbreaking work to maintain the fields, and…
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One Last Om (for now)
My “Yoga Era” may be drawing to a close. Today I made a difficult decision for the benefit of my well-being and paused my Satoyama Yoga classes indefinitely. Unfortunately, my herniated discs are not healing easily. Even when I take great care to avoid poses and movement that hurt, I still end up straining my…
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Professional Designosaur
I have been a designer for a very long time – 40 years or more. Today I realised what a dinosaur I am. Recently as I was working on a client project, I encountered a strange way of indicating bleed in an Illustrator template – a layer of 20mm rectangles on the edges and overlaps…
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