22nd International Quilt Week Yokohama, 2014 - part 2

In my last post you saw flowers and animals on quilts.
They featured on the bags as well as you will see in this post!

Almost every quilt magazine or book published in Japan include instructions for a bag, and you can always spot a number of patchwork bags carried around at the show. This is therefore a popular category of the quilt contest.

Taupe bags by 赤平昭子　Kazuko Akahira

Colourful bag by 飯田奈緒美　Naomi Iida

Dogs also made their appearance on the bags, these three won the quilter a ribbon.

横山幸美　Yukimi Yokoyama

This was not found on a bag but on another popular category,

wearable quilts:

Made by Kim Su Jin (Korea)

 May I present the Best in Show?
A pink Mt Fuji can be seen peeping through a mass of clouds. My guess is that the clouds are made up of cotton fabric for summer kimonos, aka yukata.

吉田寿恵　Kotoe Yoshida

The winning quilt among the Traditional quilts was this red jewel in machine quilting. Who wouldn't want to have such a quilt as a bedcover in December?

池敬子　Keiko Ike

A prize was also awarded to this Korean quilter

The beautiful machine quilting/embroidery made this quilt look almost like a gigantic photograph.

Chang Mi Sun (Korea)

This quilt was made by 16 high school students - and maybe their teacher?
As you can see Mt Fuji is popular with everyone, and cherry blossoms, and cats, and green tea ...

These towers are not as high as Mt Fuji but cleverly made out of string and fusable web!

竹脇章子　Akiko Takewaki

This quilt was also in the Contemporary category, and made out of unusual material, too - woven rags of indigo.

杉山美紀江　Mikie Sugiyama

If there had been a Visitors' Choice, this stunning quilt would have got a high score. There were always crowds of people enjoying the beautiful sky and marvelling at the use of material.

 島田清子　Kiyoko Shimada

Like this man, I needed some time to see the 'point' of this quilt, called New York.

 The 'point' is of course that you can make a quilt of something you see every day as you open the door of your apartment. Check out the work put into making the wall paper, below.

森村悦子 Etsuko Morimura

In my next blog post I will show you some of the Traditional quilts, as well as the ones with a Japanese theme.

22nd International Quilt Week Yokohama 2014 - Part 1

The show is now over, and I should have blogged earlier about my visit with Julie of 'My Quilt Diary', but I have been having Blogger problems. I hope to be able to write this report without any trouble.

First of all I will recommend anyone to read Julie's excellent account of the visit. Click here for her first instalment.

This is the official guide, unfortunately all information except the title is in Japanese, but you can read the address to the website. I must admit that the organisers have put in some effort to make this year's show a bit more accessible to overseas visitors. At last there is a hint of 'international', with some staff speaking a bit of English, however, there is still much that could be improved. The guide, and the website, for example. Let's hope for next year...

Anyway, as Julie has already explained a lot of the quilts on display were by famous quilters, both from Japan and overseas, and in those display areas photography was not allowed. 

Julie then went on to write about the Mini-Mini Quilt challenge. She explained about the rules and showed a pick of her photographs. 

Here are some that I took, I wonder if you can spot the three pieces of challenge fabric (see Julie's blog for details):

 佐藤潤子  Junko Satoh

 神山タツ美　Tatsumi Kamiyama

This felt just right as more and more Seasonal displays are popping up everywhere in town.

 本田洋子 Yoko Honda

Julie and I then went on to see the Miniature quilts. In this challenge the quilts should measure 50 x 50 cm, and you need to enter your quilt in a category, Traditional, Contemporary etc, but there is no general theme.

Quilters often make their own theme though, for instance travel, food and flowers are popular. Let's begin with some animals:

'Maneki neko', these cats of good fortune are appliquéd against a pieced background.

 桑田千恵子 Chieko Kuwata (I think)

More and more are interested in Mola.

 大内明美 Akemi Ouchi

There were several entries where fluffy fabric had been used.

登内のり子 Noriko Noboriuchi (?)

This elephant evokes the quilter's memories of a trip to Sri Lanka.

安部由香　Yuka Abe

Here is a detail from  a quilt that was a real crowd stopper - I wasn't able to take a picture of the entire quilt. Ms Sakai enters her charming quilts every year. Plenty of embroidery to outline the charming figures.

界亜希　Aki Sakai

Flowers were also abundant on these Miniature quilts.

Camellias

 天間絹子　Kinuko Tenma

Details of embroidery. I was drawn to this quilt like a magnet as it reminds me of my own Kafferepet!

篠崎悦子　Etsuko Shiosaki

Exquisite flowers are growing here. See how beautifully the background wall can be seen through the cutwork.

 Delight in the detailed quilting and embroidery.

植田慶子　Keiko Ueda 

This quilter, whose name I can not pronounce, has made a stunning quilt to commemorate a trip to Venice.

城取佳恵　Yoshie Shirotori (?)

I am sorry to say I did not take a photo of the winning Miniature quilts (grand prix and semi grand prix).

More quilts tomorrow.

WIPW - Orts to mental rescue

WIPW? What does it mean?  If you don't understand the jargon get it explained at Pintangle.

Kafferepet
This quilt has now got a blue edge topped with handmade lace from my mother's stash.

The lace will be stitched down using some of the TAST stitches. Here the TAST Reference Chart has come in very handy. I have found two stitches that I think will look great.

TASTy Beads Galore
I worked the stem in TAST #96 Beaded Linked Chain and the base of the flower in #90 Twisted Satin Stitch with a Bead.

Swedish Cushion
On a bare spot I added a double loop of TAST #136 Knotted Buttonhole Band.

How can a dark blue fabric look so grey? Digital cameras and blogging, eh!

 TAST Reference Chart
Stitch #136, Knotted Buttonhole Band was added to the chart, but not very neatly!

New! Pile 'em On
I have a new project here. Do you remember my collection of orts, the stray ends of embroidery thread, too short to work a long seam with, too long to throw away? I wrote about it here.

I received several pieces of disturbing news this week, things that I can't do anything about or indeed should not meddle in. Nevertheless, I needed to do something to keep my emotions in check. So my orts came to mental rescue.

On a stray piece of linen I added whatever stitch came to my mind using the short lengths of thread from my orts jar. I am just adding stitches in a 'pile 'em on' manner.

How often 'Pile 'em On' will feature in my WIPW reports will depend on how ragged my nerves are and how full the orts jar is.

TAST #136 Knotted Buttonhole Band

We have already learned several beautiful embroidery stitch bands and bars in the ongoing Take A Stitch Tuesday course. The latest one, #136, is called Knotted Buttonhole Band and is worked over a row of straight stitches.

First take a look at, or indeed join TAST and learn, the stitch at Pintangle. Then you will know what it should look like. Sharon B, our teacher,  always produces stitches that are neat and tidy.

My first attempt was on the Aida sampler, where I used a purple linen thread and a pink coton a broder. These types of thread have very little twist and the result is - appalling! Green perle 8 behaved better.

Please note, though, that going down the left side of the 'ladder' base stitches the thread sits neatly whereas working the thread in the different direction, as seen on the right side, the thread WILL twist and misbehave.

On my sampler I switched to a newly acquired hand dyed variegated perle 5,

and to a strange 'thread' or should I say nylon string, that I picked up at FOQ some years ago.

Both of these threads have a good twist which help to produce much better results.

Even so the movement of the stitch makes the thread curl up and misbehave a bit.
One TAST participant said it was hard to find where to insert the needle for the second knot. Here is how I solved that problem:

Step 1. Make the first Buttonhole loop.

 Step 2. Insert the needle in the loop before you tighten the first knot.

 Step 3. Tighten the knot around the needle.

 Step 4. Pull the needle through and gently pull the thread to knot the second loop. Use your thumb to hold the thread in place.

Step 5. Pull tight.

In the end I liked this stitch so much I am now off to play with the next one, #137 Beaded Knotted Buttonhole Bar. My report on that one will be posted later.
Happy stitching!