Some photos were taken in a hurry as I rushed from the booth to lunch, or back again. Closeups are all I have of these beautiful quilts. The geometry is complex and amazing. When people who don’t quilt think that quilters are old grannies who sit around making simple blankets, I want to show them…
Tag: kasuri
Tokyo Great International Quilt Festival 2017 Part 2
I’m writing this while sitting in a Tokyo hotel, but I have so much more to tell you about this trip. Since leaving Tokyo Dome I took a train up to Takayama, another train down to Osaka, flew to Hirosaki in Aomori prefecture, then back to Tokyo again. Three weeks on the road and I’m almost ready…
AQS QuiltWeek Grand Rapids Michigan & Japanese Textile Lecture
Helloooo, Grand Rapids! I’ll be heading your way August 11-16 for AQS QuiltWeek and I am very excited. I’ll hit up my two favorite haunts, Reserve and San Chez for fantastic food and drink, do a little shopping downtown, and check out the beautiful architecture of this little gem of a Midwestern city. AQS QuiltWeek brings…
Ringing in the New Year with a pile of old indigo
I spent New Years Eve picking apart two vintage cotton kasuri kimono, stitch by stitch. The one on the right with the cypress fence design (numazugaki 沼津垣) was so carefully sewn that it was a terror to disassemble. However, I wasn’t the first one to have taken this kimono apart, as evidenced by how it had…
Unpacking the pretties and piecing them together
I’ve been back from Houston for a week, worked 2.5 days at another show, and now I’m settling into the happy work of sorting fabrics in the studio. My show stock arrived a few days ago and is still being unpacked. Thomas and I discussed the new shelving units he will build for me, and…
Mini post from Gunma, Japan
Welcome to Silk Country. Gunma Prefecture has been famous for its silk manufacturing for more than a century. One of the largest silk mills in the world was built here in 1872, which took silk textiles out of the realm of the rich and put them into the reach of the masses for the first…
Octopus or Jewel?
Flipping through reference books while looking for examples of goldwork embroidery, I stumbled onto a page in Flowers, Dragons, & Pine Trees that made me pause, somewhat concerned, and turn the book upside-down. The image, plate 77 on page 234, is credited as an indigo dyed Kasuri Futonji from the 19th or 20th century. From the text,…
An experiment in washing vintage indigo kasuri, part 2
(Continued from yesterday’s post, as promised) So how did it fare after the second wash? The blue background color is sharper and clearer, but the splash areas that were once light blue are now white. This does not diminish its attractiveness in my opinion, but I had been hoping to retain the light blue on…
An experiment in washing vintage indigo kasuri, part 1
Along with shibori and sashiko, I am a sucker for kasuri (絣). Popular in Japan since the Edo era, kasuri (or gasuri) is a double woven ikat, meaning the threads are dyed prior to weaving and the design is in both the warp and weft threads. Machine woven Bingo kasuri, which constitutes the bulk of…
A love for both the common fiber and the extraordinary textile @KimonoMomo 