Dyed and Gone to Heaven: Japanese Adventures

The main reason and the timing for our Japan tour is the Yokohama Quilt Week.

There is always an enormous quilt on display at the entrance which is breathtaking.

Lots of different booths are selling a wide variety of fabrics and notions. The Japanese are very into handbags so it's great to have such a selection of handles and clasps and bits and pieces.

Lovely to see the ladies in kimonos shopping for patchwork fabrics

Some of the clothes available for sale are magnificent. This is my favourite booth where all the fabrics is brown persimmon dyed linen (I think). The fabric appeared to originally come in small sacks stitched and quite stiff so I don't know how it is treated to make the clothes so soft. Unfortunately they are very very expensive - a jacket is about $1000. Lovely but well out of my price range.

We actually saw the sacks later in the tour when we visited the traditional Sake brewery and they seemed to be the sacks the rice came in. They had some lovely small pieces made out of them there too but still quite expensive.

There are lots of stores selling recycled kimono fabric including my favourite indigo dyed pieces as well as some magnificent boro (recycled) fabrics. These are stitched together with a sashimi style stitching in a patchwork manner. They feel lush and rich and full of history.

Of course there are lots of quilts on display but unfortunately most of the exhibits won't allow photography - you have to buy a Show book. This year Modern Quilt guru Weeks Ringle and Kaffe Fassett had exhibitions and I believe Kaffe's fabric sold out the first day. I was very pleased to meet up with Weeks as we have been Facebook friends for ages.

They even have much more interesting food than other quilt shows. I succumbed to this iced grape drink which was delicious as well as mochi (rice paste) balls on sticks and delicious fried chicken.

Very popular was the frozen chopped fruit salad complete with condensed milk topping. The guys even came around a little later to top up your condensed milk - yum!

As an added bonus this year - in the hall next door was the Antiques fair which captivated me. I spent hours wandering around looking for interesting fabrics and was really really lucky to find a stall selling vintage yuzen stencil screens. I bought quite a few and must admit that I went back the next day and bought even more and can't wait to try them out.

Here are a few

I really wanted to buy this chest of drawers with a different shape mold in each drawer but when I went back the next day I had misread the price by an extra 0 which made it a little out of reach but it was really lovely.