A bit more about me

Finally, my website has a front page!

I wanted something different, something that reflected me and Kyoto and kimono and sewing and embroidery and just everything. So being associated as I am with an internationally famous manga artist, I asked for a little help. After looking over my site, especially the first post talking about my childhood Ginger dolls, he came up with this sketch of me as a Japanese kokeshi doll. Then he took the sketch and morphed it into a wonderful welcoming entry way for my evolving little website.

For those less familiar with kokeshi, here’s a little picture showing the real thing. A classic Japanese toy carved from wood and painted in bright colors.

So now come look at me in the final version of my new front page, click here.

And to see more work by Mulele Jarvis, the artist who created this wonderful front page for me, click here.

It’s said that a journey of 10,000 miles starts with a single step, but after a few million steps or so, it’s good to pause for a backward glance and consider the distance you’ve traveled. My current life’s journey started with birth in West Virginia, then I grew up in New Jersey, left home for New York City, and raised my own son in San Francisco. I thought I’d been all over the map, but would anyone have predicted I’d move to Japan? I guess my sense of the map just got a little bigger when I moved here.

I suppose there might have been a premonition of my travels in the number of childhood hours I spent trying to fabricate miniature kimono for my collection of Ginger dolls. Like so many others with a life-long bent for textiles, I had a seamstress grandmother who must have transmitted her “fabric-loving gene”. But there must have also been some special twist that made a little girl in a New Jersey farming community search out Asian costume books at the town library, then try to replicate the images in doll-size. So now I live in Nishijin, the traditional weaving district of Kyoto where shopping for life-size kimono is one of my favorite pastimes. And in an odd twist on my childhood passion, I now get my kicks converting kimono fabric to western clothes.