I'm wrapping up my quick trip to Tokyo,
and as usual I am blown away by the craftsmanship and the Japanese aesthetics that are on display here at the Tokyo Quilt Festival.
I always have my eye out for different embodiments of visual trends, and one thing that really struck me after walking the show, is how ubiquitous the visual language of dots and stripes has become. The night after I walked the show, I was dreaming about the philosophical meaning of stripes and dots all night!
The dots were often appliqued circles, some as small as buttons, some pieced with curved seams, but they contrast enough (by color, value or dimension) to really stand out as a DOT.
The stripes were present in so many ways –
printed stripes that were pieced into the quilts, parallel lines of straight stitching that created a stripe-like pattern, and string-pieced strips of fabric that created an overall ombre effect.
It is the 10th anniversary of the Tokyo Quilt Festival, and I saw a theme of little houses over and over again. There were tiny embroidered fairy-houses in group quilts, there were three-dimensional houses that multiplied into a fabric village, and there were graphic images of fanciful gingerbread houses.
Ladies were taking closeup pictures of fine stitching, with their cell phones. Groups of quilters clustered around intricate quilts, seriously discussing the techniques used. There were more people getting close to the quilts and inspecting the fine handiwork, than there were people standing at a distance to take in the big picture!
That says it all perhaps. Here in Japan most of the quilts are all handmade, and it is truly mind-boggling to look at some of these large pieces that are hand-pieced, hand-quilted, and hand-embellished. A different lifestyle for most of these quilters, that makes for a different culture of hand-stitched quilts. If you've seen the Japanese quilts at Houston, you know what I mean!
Somehow I managed to fit in a half-day trip to the temple flea market at Kawagoe with Mary Koval, and Carol Veillon of Quiltmania(French Quilts), then Noriko Endo's gallery exhibit. Today I took the subway to the Costume Museum and the National Opera House. Tomorrow I'll catch a contemporary quilt exhibit in Ginza with my friend Akemi.
I am still sorting through my photos (and recovering from something that I ate that didn't agree with my vegetarian tummy!) so by Tuesday in my Creative Nudge I'll have a bunch of images posted on my photo page and my Facebook page, with comments on my blog. I am flying home Monday.
To my American, French and Japanese friends here who made my trip so memorable – Arigato!
