My daughter moved to a snow-less part of Japan about eight years ago. Now that she doesn't have to deal with the reality of living with snow for six months of the year, she gets a touristy thrill from brief visits to Hokkaido during the winter holidays. She took this photo of our house a couple weeks ago, and it became the inspiration for the first of the etegami in my new series of whimsical houses.
postscript: Bozena Wojtaszek of
The Textile Cuisine sent me a wonderful quilted postcard which she says was inspired by my verbal and visual descriptions of our house in the snow. Check out her
blog and her Etsy
shop. You'll love them!! The card is in my
mailart gallery blog.
Posts
Wow, that's a LOT of snow. LIke my family's cabin in the Sierras (California). We still laugh about the time we were in NYC and 4 inches shut down the entire city. A big snow for us is 3 feet in one night!
ReplyDeleteOh no! looking at your own house.
ReplyDeleteHow fun to see your "translations" into etegamis... the third one would be my favorite, it looks like a happy giraffe.
Beautiful cards, Debbie (I esp. like the top one!) and it's so nice to see a pic of your home! Happy new year, dear friend!
ReplyDeleteCute houses! I could live in all of them. Your house, on the other hand, will cause you some serious workout, removing the heavy snow. :-)
ReplyDeletewhat a good idea!
ReplyDeleteDelicious!
ReplyDeleteHoly tamoly! I can hardly believe you have this kind of snow and winter six months of the year. Wow! That is tons more than we get in northern Michigan, especially nowadays. Stay warm and cozy. Talk about being snowed in!
ReplyDeleteWith all this snow I wonder how a traditional Hokkaido house would look like...
ReplyDeleteTiberius
Tiberius, this house *is* a traditional Hokkaido style of house. I mean: rectangular with a very steep roof. Even the Ainu, Hokkaido's indigenous people built them in this shape, except with branches and tall grasses for the wall and roof. The architecture here is very different from that of the main islands of Japan, which build their houses with typhoons- rather than snow-- in mind.
ReplyDeleteModern buildings in the city now have roofs that are inverted triangles. In other words, they look flat from below, but they slope toward the center of the roof and have roof heaters to melt the snow and send it down a drain through the center of the inverted triangle. Many times, though, the mechanism can't keep up with the amount of snowfall, and the snow piles up at the edges and crashes down to street level anyway. The apartment building next to us is like this.
Our steeply sloped roof is the best design for a Hokkaido house, but you have to have enough land around the house to prevent snow from falling on people who are just passing by.
So here I am - spending this evening with all your blogs, just found your nice comment here. Thank you, Debbie!
ReplyDelete