Christmas quilts from my stash - 4

The fourth quilt I have on display at this time of the year is called Tudor Echoes, and is related to my Sub Rosa (shown yesterday).

It is made by my good friend and award winning hand quilter Jacquie Harvey in the UK.
The two of us worked the Kaleidoscope Hoffman challenge side by side, but on either side of the Globe. We checked our progress weekly, a kind of private WIPW report, and fondly refer to our quilts as Lizzy. I am sure you can recognise some of the prints from my Sub Rosa in this quilt.

Jacquie is not only a talented quilter but has great skills as a dressmaker, too. She often combines quilting and dressmaking and makes 'wearable quilts', or rather quilted garments. Well, I am sure her wonderful creations are not to be worn, they kind of belong in a museum. Head over to her website and check the Gallery.

In this close up you can see her skill in Elizabeth I's costume. By embroidering the beige Hoffman fabric with black she created a bit of 'Blackwork' and the flute ruff collar is cleverly made. There might be more beads on my quilt, but the ones on Jacquie's are bigger!!!

The two quilts we made for the Kaleidoscope Hoffman challenge are a challenge to store, and that is one of the reasons why Jacquie gave me the quilt! As if I would have more space in Tokyo!! It travelled to Japan inside a suit cover bag and was lucky to be hung in the business class wardrobe. Like true royalty Lizzy sailed through Customs in spite of all her jewellery, well it is paste, after all!

Christmas quilts from my stash - 3

The third quilt I usually display in December is called Sub Rosa.

In 2003 I made it for the Kaleidoscope Hoffman Challenge. The theme was Elizabethan Splendour.

One stipulation was that it should measure 1 m square and contain at least 50% of one or more of the seven challenge prints. At that time I had been given lots of fancy remnants from a seamstress who makes evening frocks and wedding gowns. Here was a good opportunity to use some of that red silk with the Hoffman prints.

This is an extract from my entry:
'The theme is ELIZABETHAN SPLENDOUR...' so I decided to make something that reflects Queen Elizabeth I. A traditional quilt, with an organized pattern but many new ideas, rich and overly decorated but tasteful. To bring out the beautiful patterns in the Hoffman prints I used a heavy red silk as the main contrast and added as much gold, pearls and jewels as I found suitable.
The centre of 'Japanese patchwork' blocks, filled with wadding and decorated with metallic embroidery and pearls, is framed with eight borders. The main of these borders consists of a winding Hoffman bias tape where various flowers have sprouted; they are appliqued, folded, ruched and embroidered. There are several flowers in handmade velvet; I even turned one Hoffman print into a velvet flower! This border is then quilted with tiny pearls on the front and gold beads on the back. There are well over 3000 pearls and beads on the entire quilt and it is edged with a frilled gold lace.

As you can see I was into quilting in unusual ways already ten years ago.
Sub Rosa didn't pick up a prize, but it was featured in 'Fabrications' Oct/Nov 2003.

Christmas quilts from my stash - 2

The second in my series of Christmas quilts is the painted stained glass quilt.

I made this quilt based on a piece of real stained glass

As you can see it is a very small piece. It was once attached to a holder (the reason there is a round hole at the bottom) for a tea light.

The quilt is larger and measures 29 x 40 cm. I painted the off white cotton with acrylic fabric paint and then set the paint with a warm iron. The outlines were quilted in black. The front was folded to the back and a backing was stitched on. There is no border, nor a binding.

A change of decorations - Christmas quilts from my stash - 1

There are four seasons in Japan and each is full of its own character.
Winters are cold, and in many parts snowy,

you eat hot pot dishes and keep warm with hot water bottles or kotatsu (table with heater underneath and a thick floor length cover to keep your legs warm).

Spring is famous for its cherry blossoms,

flower viewing picnics, the end and beginning of the academic year, and hay fever.
In summer, the humidity is over powering, first with the rainy season, then with the heat. Hydrangeas,

fans, water melon, ice tea, fire works, mosquito coils belong to this time of the year.
Autumn harvests fill the tables with fruit, vegetables and delicious oily fish. The changing of the leaves can be spectacular...

There are other things that mark the seasons and time of year. There are about 16 public holidays. The Japanese love to celebrate, they have festivals at local shrines, note the dates in the Japanese and Chinese calendar, or take up foreign traditions like St Valentine and Halloween.

Everywhere you go you will see signs of what time of year it is - there are decorations in shop displays, in schools and workplaces, on posters and advertisements, and of course in homes.

After arriving in Japan I soon took up this tradition and change the decorations at home for the various events.

Now it was time to put up the Christmas decorations. In the coming weeks I will blog about them, and first out is this wall quilt.

The mother of a student made this for me many years ago. I feel so humble and grateful that she would spend so much time and effort on this. It is mostly made of 1 cm squares, and she must have had a fantastic collection of Christmas prints to make the tree. There are lots of tiny bells embellishing the quilt.

Harvest Moon

Claudia, this is for you.

In the beginning of January I blogged about this wall hanging of the the first sun rise of the year.

It is a actually a two sided quilt with the harvest moon on the back.

We enjoyed the beautiful full moon the other night.

 (The three smaller 'moons' underneath are the headlights of aeroplanes flying in to land at Haneda Airport. Pity about the electric power lines cutting the cloud in two.)

Anyway, I took out my two sided 'kakemono' moon quilt and displayed it in our 'alcove'.

The moon is made of two layers of machine lace and sits on a piece of dark navy velvet.

I also displayed some tsukimi dango. Mine are just ornamental and made of fabric, but the real things are Japanese sweets made from steamed and pounded rice, shaped into balls and piled neatly onto a wooden stand, called san pou.

Welsh quilts in Stowmarket

While in the UK, I visited Stowmarket where there was an exhibition of Welsh quilts in Abbot's Hall at the Museum of Anglian Life.

The exhibition is now closed, I'm afraid, and the link above might not function any longer, but here are some photographs:

Thousands of tiny hexagons in this quilt.















Aren't the colours of this quilt just stunning!

This is a photograph of a photograph. Look at that fantastic quilt pattern.

There were not so many quilts and the information was a bit basic (for me anyway) but there were also these display cases of various needlework projects and notions. It was a pleasant introduction to quilting.

A beauty in its own right!

WIPW - Flowers

Work
In
Progress
Wednesday

Regular readers know by now that WIPW for me means a report on my Kafferepet quilt.
We've come to the last kind of items on the quilt - flowers.

For the well dressed coffee party table there must be flowers. Winters in Sweden are long, dark and cold so almost every home has a selection of potted houseplants, many of them flowering. A pot with hyacinths, African violets or orchids may decorate the table.

However, cut flowers are more common, especially in the warmer seasons. They may be shop bought, or picked in the garden. Usually they are beautifully arranged in a vase, but they can simply be strewn on the table as well.

One of the most popular summer flowers is the Ox Eyed Daisy, and it is even featured on the Swedish National costume.

I come from a long line of florists, and gardeners, who cultivated new varieties of fruit and flowers. Having flowers around the house is second nature to me, and for this quilt I tried to follow in my ancestors' footsteps and bred a new 'Heart Petalled Daisy', i.e. I appliquéd a couple of fantasy flowers, ha, ha!

Flowers on the table can of course also be the edible variety. There might be crystallised violets on a cake. How about some rose jelly as a cake filling, lavender scones, lemon scented pelargonium leaves in the muffin batter, camomile tea or small frozen flowers in the ice cubes...

-.-.-.-.-.
Japan is famous for its Ikebana. You can see these artistically arranged flowers in the alcove of a traditional living room,

in restaurants and even railway stations or post offices.
However, these arrangements are not placed on a dining table. Even other bouquets of flowers are displayed on side tables, in the window or at the Buddhist altar (in this last case they are a special selection of flowers), but NOT on the table. Now here comes a contradiction: That doesn't mean that there are no flowers on the table! There are, but they are for consumption; cherry blossoms cured in salt and used for tea, chrysanthemum  petals pickled in vinegar and honey, rice steamed in bamboo leaves... Also like kitchen wizards in many other countries, a Japanese chef might carve vegetables to look like flowers, e.g a slice of carrot turned into a plum blossom.
Oh, and of course, in spring the chops sticks might rest on a small twig with cherry blossoms and in autumn there might be a red maple leaf in the bamboo basket of deep fried vegetables - not for consumption, and not in the common home, you need to go to a 'fancy' restaurant to see this.

-.-.-.-.-.
More progress on the border.

I used Sharon's CQ Stencils for the swirly TAST stems. #56 Sailor Stitch on the left and #12 Barred and Alternating Barred Chain Stitch on the right

Some stitch treatment on flower and leaves. There will be beads added later.
For more WIPW reports, visit Pintangle.

WIPW - Mysljus & Tändstickor

How fast the weeks pass by; it is already Wednesday again and time to give a WIPW progress report on the Kafferepet quilt.

Last week I showed you some silver items, a cake server and some spoons.
Let's move on to copper. This week I have a candlestick made out of copper to show you.

Kafferep is a daytime gathering, and this quilt depicts a party held in summer, after all, the blooms in the border are summer flowers.
So you might rightly ask what a candlestick and a lit candle have to do with a daytime summer coffee party.

Well, winters are long and dark, the tradition of using candles to brighten the day is firmly rooted, and so even in summer people light candles. Especially when you have laid the table with a nice table cloth and the best china.

There is even a special name for candles that are only used for adding a good mood; mysljus. (charming and comforting candles).

I have also appliquéd a box of matches, tändstickor. The details of the illustration are too small for embroidery so I used a permanent ink pen and iron-on crayons instead.
Solstickan is a brand of the world famous Swedish safety match. An amount of the profit goes to charity. You can read all about it here.


All flowers on the border are now in full bloom so I got started on embellishing the undulating bias tape. I want to make use of as many TAST stitches as possible and chose Fancy Hem Stitch for this:

For more WIPW reports and lots of inspiration on how to use Sharon's new Stencils, head over to Pintangle.

NHK Partnership quilt 2014

Last night NHK (the Japanese state run broadcasting company) announced the theme for next year's Partnership quilt project.

You can read what I have written earlier about NHK Partnership quilt here.

Last year it was CIRCLE and I contributed with this block:

For 2014 the theme is FLOWER LANGUAGE.

This is something the Japanese love and is often used in TV dramas, or indeed for quilted gifts between friends. Here is a list of flowers and their meaning.

Be sure I will not make a Lettuce or Cypress block! I might even stretch the rules and make a fantasy flower with a new meaning. After all, language is always changing!

Sashiko, crazy quilt, appliqué, pieced, Celtic bias tape... I am sure anything goes!



Should you wish to participate, then these are the rules:

• one block per person
• 22cm x 22cm with a seam allowance of 1.5cm included
• flimsy block, i.e. no wadding, no quilting
• your name should be written with pen in the seam allowance of the lower right hand corner
• your block should have reached NHK by 31st August, 2013
• enclose a note with your name, address, tel no, email address
• send to:

Partnership Quilt
NHK Sutekini Handmade
2-2-1 Jinnan
Shibuya-ku
Tokyo 150-8001
Japan

Your block will be joined with other blocks into large bed size quilts and quilted by volunteers. These quilt will be displayed at Tokyo International Great Quilt Festival in January next year, where they will be raffled off.

WIPW - Prinsesstårta

This is my Work In Progress Wednesday report on 'Kafferepet', the Swedish coffee party quilt.

So far I have shown the following blocks:
Coffee pot, cup and saucer,  glass of raspberry squash, cinnamon rolls, cup cakes,  platter with seven kinds of biscuits

It is now time for the pièce de résistance, the TÅRTA - a gateau, a cream cake, a decoration cake... The most famous, and probably the most popular, one in Sweden is the Prinsesstårta. Who can guess what the name means? Yes? That's right, the Princess Cake.

It consists of a sponge cake layered with whipped cream, custard cream and, in most cases, raspberry jam. This is then covered with a lid of green marzipan and decorated with a rose or carnation.
Here is a picture of one I made recently for a birthday party:

To see how Camilla Jakobsson makes a professional cake watch this Yutube video here. (Narration in Swedish)

And this is my appliqué interpretation for the Kafferepet quilt.
I topped some green fabric with silver printed organza (similar to the organza used for the pressed glass and ice in previous blocks) in the hope this will look like the frosting sugar, I ruched some pink fabric for the carnation and used lace for the doily.

Another rose has grown on the border:

Over at Pintangle yet another crazy block has sprung to life. Go and have a look at the 'naked' block, then return next Wednesday to see how Sharon has embellished it. I am sure you won't be disappointed!

WIPW - Pressed glass and cinnamon rolls

Work In Progress Wednesday - the best way to get a move on and finish those Un Finished Objects. Go to Pintangle and see bustling activity. Then, why not join in?


Kafferepet

I got a few inquiries about the ice cube I made last week.
The fabric used is synthetic 'organza', one piece is raspberry pink and the other white with a pattern in silver. Both were given to me by two good friends in the UK, many years ago. It is wonderful to dig such treasures out of the stash and remember opening the Christmas presents... Oh, no, I've started to digress again!


Back to the ice cube. I cut a small piece of each fabric and folded them over and over and over before appliquéing onto the glass, taking care to place the red fabric along the line of the raspberry squash.

This silvery fabric has also been used for two of the other blocks on the quilt.

On the block I feature today, you will see a plateful of 'kanelbullar', cinnamon buns. (If you've ever been to an IKEA store, you might have had a cup of coffee and such a bun, although there is a huge difference in taste between a factory produced bun and the home made ones on this plate - golden brown cotton, delicious cinnamon thread and French Knot sugar , SCRUMPTIOUS!).
The plate is supposed to look like pressed glass.

Then I have a few blue blooms on the border:

A Change of Decoration

The Children's Day is over and all decorations related to it have been packed away. The Koinobori (Flying Carp) quilt has been replaced with a small 50x50 cm quilt I made for the Yokohama International Quilt Week's Miniature contest in 2001.

On a trip earlier that year to the island of Shikoku I had bought a small pack of fabric from the island. Some of the pieces are the very attractive Awa Shijira-ori which is woven in Tokushima prefecture. It is a kind of seer-sucker often used for summer wear and yukata.
I mixed in other Japanese fabrics, as well as a piece from a Swedish table cloth. True to form, there is (a lot of) embroidery, and in metallic thread.

The title of the quilt is Naruto-no-maki and illustrates the fantastic whirlpools in the Naruto Strait that I saw on my trip.

WIPW - China and Ox Eyed Daisy

Work In Progress Wednesday. Look at how Sharon has completed her lacy crazy quilt block! Read the comments to see how others have been busy. Click here.

My progress:
Here are some more facts about 'Kafferepet'.
Last week we looked at the biscuits on the platter.

This week I want you to look at the platter itself. 

The design comes from a real china plate. Actually you might remember it from the post I wrote about St Valentine and chocolate.

I really wanted to use this set of china dishes for the quilt.
First I selected the light blue fabric, then copied the design onto the fabric with my FOUNTAIN PEN and INK, and finally drew the brown line on the edge.

This china pattern comes from Rörstrand and is called Ostindia. You can read its history and see some of the parts here.

Now with those biscuits you of course need coffee, and a coffee cup:

Again this is drawn with fountain pen and ink on fabric and then appliquéd onto the checked fabric. The text on the little sign invites you to the coffee party: Välkommen på kafferep!

All this was done in the past couple of years, it is a UFO as you know, but I have now started working on the border (which I will show you in full later).

I have added an Ox Eyed Daisy, so this is my Work In Progress Wednesday.

Children's Day

Do you remember Hina Matsuri, the Doll Festival or Girls' Day which is celebrated on March 3rd? I blogged about it here.

Well it is now time to prepare for Children's Day, formerly called Boys' Day, or in Japanese Kodomo-no-Hi or Tango-no-Sekku. For indepth details you can read this article.

The actual day is May 5th but just like Hina Matsuri, you decorate the home from about a month beforehand. So it was time to take out my wall hanging of flying carps:

I made this many years ago using whatever I had available so there is a mismatch of material. It depicts a streamer at the top, then Daddy Carp, Mummy Carp and Baby Carp.

In the countryside huge streamers are hung near farmhouses (these are at Shimoda, in Kyushu) or across rivers, but in the city smaller ones are displayed from balconies.

Carps are strong fish and symbolize the fighting spirit parents want their children (sons) to have to overcome any problem in life.

There are other symbols of strength and courage used for decorations. The most famous is the samurai armor, and some of these 'dolls' take up a lot of space in homes, (and make a big dent in the grandparents' bank account!):

Is there anyone out there who's interested in braids and cords?  Feast your eyes on the details.

Well if you can't find space, or money,  for something like this, why not make a small helmet yourself? This one can sit in my palm.
I got the pattern from a friend and made it from chirimen and kimono scraps. The golden 'braid' is a thin string from a box of sweets. Three cheers for recycling!

Someone gave me this little doll, also made of chirimen, of Kintaro. Note his helmet made of folded paper (origami).