Unfortunately, that's not possible. Both she and I had expected that these would be acceptable, and in fact, I had the packaging prepared ready for them, but it's not going to happen ... this time around.

Let's take a closer look, to see where we are still 'short'. Here's a bit of the background:

And in another copy, where she had tried to even out the colour by printing it twice:

As you can see, we have a problem with goma ('sesame seed') impression. She has got her paste/water balance a little off, with the result that there is a mottled/speckled appearance in some of the wider areas of colour. The same thing is (slightly) apparent in the deep red of the flower (more visible in the enlargement):

Both she and I joked about this, as we sat there looking at the prints. "You know, if we ask the customers to take off their glasses, and perhaps stand back a bit ... then these are fine!"

I felt a bit bad for her - to get this close, but 'not quite'. And it was interesting to see her sit there going over the batch, looking at them 'one more time', in a kind of hope that they would start to seem OK (just as I have done any number of times in the past!)

Anyway, there's nothing for it but to put them into the drawer, and keep going. The next batch of paper is now cut to size and moistened, and she'll start again tomorrow morning. We'll concentrate a bit more carefully on the difficult wide impressions, and who knows ... maybe these will be the ones!

In other news here, let's turn the camera around, away from the windows ...

Look at this ... actual 'furniture'! What gives?

Well, what with all the new activity - and new people - around here these days, we're finding that it's critical to keep ourselves organized. And the little wooden shelf that I have used for all these years to store my supplies (visible behind Tsushima-san in the first photo on this page) is simply not cutting it.

So one day last week I jumped on my bike and made the rounds of some used furniture shops in the area. When I first came to Japan, there were very few such places, as nobody wanted 'used' stuff in their home, but times have changed, 're-cycle' is the new buzzword, and there is now a huge amount of choice. And as a lot of people are downsizing these days, there is very low demand for large furniture items like this unit. It's rather a bit more 'fancy' than I wanted, but it was very cheap, has a lot of drawers and small shelves, which is exactly what we need, and they agreed to deliver it too. So here we are ... a nice clean (and dust-free!) home for all the supplies!

(If you look closely at these two photos, you'll see that this thing was a bit too tall for our room, but a couple of minutes with a power saw took care of that!)