World Quilt Festival 2022 in Yokohama - Part 1

For quilters in Japan, as well as for many visiting from abroad, the end of Tokyo International Great Quilt Festival which used to be held annually in January in Tokyo Dome came as a blow. Although a show was planned for 2021, it was not only cancelled but abruptly axed with the announcement that no more shows were to be organised. As it was such a popular, and always a crowded event, see photo below, that came as shock. 

Adding to this, the closure of the Yokohama International Quilt Week some years earlier, meant we now had no big shows left in Japan.

The senseis, i.e. master quilters and quilt teachers, must have been even more disappointed than us hobby quilters, as they lost a place to showcase their work, teach and promote quilting. In the spring of this year, a group of them opened a new show under the umbrella of Japan Quilt Society. It was on a very small scale and featured mainly work we had seen before. I wrote about the show here.

At that show, the organisers promised to hold a new quilt exhibition in Yokohama in November. 

It is November now, and the show was held last Thursday, Friday and Saturday. This time it was a much better affair! I went there to meet my friends and enjoy the glory of quilting.

Under the theme 花鳥風月, read KA-CHO-FU-GETSU and meaning Beauties of Nature, or Beauties and Splendors of Japan, 

were these quilts:

長坂清海＊Kiyomi Nagasaka

was inspired by this vivid night sky she once saw in the autumn moonlight

長沼玲子＊Reiko Naganuma's

autumnal leaves turning colour against a clear blue sky.

田中裕美＊Hiromi Tanaka

is depicting the remains of creatures from the past. They must be alive as some of the parts have started moving out of the quilt!

半よしゑ＊Yoshie Nakaba

shows her love for flowers

宮下季久代＊Kikuyo Miyashita

I like this quilt now just as much as I did when I first saw it in 2015. Showing 'old' quilts must indicate that we have not yet fully recovered from the slump during the pandemic.

菊池美峯子＊Mineko Kikuchi

She used kimono silk, and it always amazes me that so many bright pink pieces can be found. It must have taken both time and money to collect a set of small strips of these vivid pinks.

岩佐ふさ子＊Fusako Iwasa

added plenty of beads for her Cosmos flowers.

津川明子＊Akiko Tsugawa

made this in celebration of the special flower arrangement needed for the tea ceremony.

矢沢順子＊Junko Yazawa

made this modern quilt and it feels like an I-Spy quilt with all the small details of wildlife. I love the movement she has managed to create in this quilt.

日下宗＊Takashi Kusaka

was inspired by Karen Eckmeier's design for Rose Twirls, a kind of curved Log Cabin block. They make excellent waves, don't you think?

遊佐みどり＊Midori Yusa

Have you seen this kind of scrunched-up fabric before? I bought a bit of it in the UK many years ago. You layer it and stitch it by machine to the fabric you want to use for your quilt. Then you wash it and both layers crinkle up. It is difficult to use but looks very impressive in a quilt.

This quilt also has a lot of hand embroidery stitches, which I like, of course!

小髙紀子＊Noriko Kodaka

must have tamed her (computerised?) sewing machine and created this Hungarian embroidery design. I wonder how much tread she has used? Those flowers are really thick with thread. The white lace border is also machine stitched.

石原淳子＊Junko Ishihara

made this money quilt in 2016 but I have no recollection of seeing it before. The banana is life-size and stuffed.

長谷川紀子＊Noriko Hasegawa

was inspired by a blossoming cherry tree, lit up at night. 

In my neighbourhood, there is s gigantic cherry tree and when it is illuminated after dark it looks just like this quilt. I can almost smell the faint fragrance, too.

関田陽子＊Yoko Sekita

is famous for her fantastic pictorial quilts often with a lot of fun scenes of famous characters (in this blog post from 2018 you can spot Alice in Wonderland at a Japanese foxes' wedding!).

In this Egyptian quilt, which is inspired by a visit to the Metropolitan Museum, Ms Sekita kept a straight face but paid great attention to detail and used a lot of gold.

田中副子＊Fukuko Tanaka

got her inspiration from a forest and wanted to highlight the shapes of branches and twigs of the trees. She stitched canals and stuffed them in Trapunto style to make this striking quilt.

石飛悦子＊Etsuko Ishitobi

Here we also have a lot of structure. This is an underwater scene of a coral reef. Look at the raw edges, the fanned-out circles of folded fabric, edged with a collection of blue and white prints of yukata (cotton kimono used in summer) fabric.

寺田恭子＊Kyoko Terada

saw this view of Mt Everest from a hotel window

秋本雅子＊Noriko Akimoto

says she loves orange and made this kaleidoscope quilt with a lot of orange tints.

島野徳子＊Noriko Shimano

In this gigantic quilt, Ms Shimano celebrates the arabesque patterns that spread via the Silk Road. 

You can see that she has used mainly kimono silks (shibori and white cranes on red background).

More quilts to report on in the next blog post.