Tokyo - Day 2....Shopping

We decided to do the shopping 'Thing' today, as we leave for Sapporo on Saturday for some well deserved snow!!

We took the Tokyo Metro to Ginza, which is the more upmarket shopping area.
I found this most amazing bag by Issey Miyake. We also had a look through the food department of the Matsuya Department Store, as well as the Issey Miyake Section where I bought my wonderful bag.

We wondered through alot of Matsuya, and then moved on to
Ikebukuro, another shopping district with a lot of electronic stores and Seibu Department Store





















Here is "The Apprentice" at one of the large crossings.



We saw all these people standing around near a crossing and noticed that it was the "smoking area"...

Japan - Day 1

We are finally Here!!
After a tedious flight on a tight squeeze and not eating much of the awful airline food (even though our airline is supposedly a great one) I was finger printed and photographed at the airport. Customs was a breeze compared to aussie customs, we were out with our bags in a matter of minutes!

Here was the difficult part: Our knowlegde of Japanese is limited!!
So we winged it with the help of non-english speaking Japanese (LOL)and purchase our Train tickets for the "Morning Liner" (an express train) from Narita Airport in to Tokyo, which is approx a 65km trip across the countryside.

We then got to our Station (Ueno)where we had to change to the subway. The only problem was that there are no Ticket Booths with people, just machines and they are in Kanji (japanese characters)but Lucky me!! "The apprentice" (my beautiful daughter) spotted the ENGLISH button, so then she figure out how much it would cost for us to get to our destination and which, out of the 50 buttons to press, was only Y160.

The hardest thing here is to try to figure out the addresses as the buildings do not run consecutively...
And just when you think you're getting a bit lost (in translation) someone pops up and really helps you..
Cute Traditional Houses



Sascha in the street where Our 'Ryokan' is. It's the green/blue glass building in the background.








This building won an architectural award. It's where we are staying. Andon Ryokan. I would definitely recommend this Guesthouse. Friendly atmosphere, quiet and has a modern/traditional feel. We are staying here for at least 6 nights. As we want to try a capsule hotel, we will UNFORTUNATELY have to leave this beautiful guesthouse in about a week. So we will definitely have to return here on our next visit to Tokyo.








( We wandered around the local area (Taito-ku) and found this litttle tiny restaurant that only serves Unagi
it was delicious!!

Organizing our Trip To Japan.

Well, the time has flown by and it is only a week until we set off for Japan! The 'apprentice'(my beautiful daughter) is so excited to go, as we all adore japanese things/design, etc. She's getting ready for a snow boarding experience in Sapporo, if we can organize it.

And lucky us! Looks like it's going to be a cooooollllllld winter... just what we wanted! plenty of snow (haven't seen REAL snow in a few years, living in the land of OZ).
We are glad to be getting away from the scorching heat of Australian summer..

Bag is almost all packed as we are entering an opposite season... just have to put the make-up bag in and we're all set.

A few studio things to do; then put my etsy shop to sleep for couple of weeks... i will make an announcement that i am away but some things can still be ordered.

Back to work to finish off a couple of things. I will post on my blog almost nightly when we are in Japan - a bit of a travelogue....

Pendant Swap

This has been a long time coming!

This was a fun swap! There were 4 of us: myself, Andes Cruz, Tosca Teran & Ann Jenkins.
We each made a pendant (three actually) and received three gorgeous pendants in exchange in the mail.

Here they are in all their glory. Mine were obviously the sawpierced japanese floral discs with a pearl drop at the end. Andes Cruz made the greenie turquoise pendant with the little spherical pieces surrounding the stone. Ann Jenkins made the one in the grass with the multi colored enameled flutes on a domed disc. Tosca made the jellyfish-like glass and metal pendant.

They are all so beautiful. It's great to see the differing styles and techniques we all prefer to use.

I'm hoping that others may want to do a fun swap like that again.

I've been Busy...

Well, life has been keeping me from writing ... well, the truth is that I've moved house and studio ans as you know, it takes a while to get settled in and iron out the 'bugs' in the new places.


We've had dust storms, electrical storms, wind storms, tropical style rain, blamy spring days and a quick cold change, followed by today's heat wave of 41C and no wind.... my poor vegies.... all limp and waiting for rain... and all that in a span of a few weeks.

Here are a couple of new stack rings:



Just recently, I participated in EtsyMetals Charm Swap #4
i got this bag of goodies: