Teresa

The three-layered quilt was imported from America to Japan. It was quickly adopted and adapted to become a favorite pastime for an estimated three million quilters in Japan today. Once adopted, Japan took this pastime seriously and systems were quickly built to teach adept and eager sewists how to make masterpieces. By the 1990s, Japanese quilt makers were world renowned for their traditional hand-pieced and hand-quilted quilts. Go inside the Tokyo International Great Quilt Festival and learn how it became the largest attended quilt event in the world. Japan’s journey from importer to trailblazer is a fascinating journey through Japanese history, cultural expectations, and the process by which one is deemed a ‘master quilter’ or not.

Go back in time, to a fascinating point in Japan’s history when cotton & indigo – two epic plants – forever changed Japan’s textile world. Meet the masters who are preserving the old traditions of indigo dyeing and meet the quilters who have dedicated their quiltmaking to working with antique cotton. Learn the stories behind traditional cotton textiles such as kasuri, katazome and kimono cloth and how a handful of Japanese weavers are continuing these traditions into the 21^st century. Go inside Japan’s esteemed textile printing mills and hear why the finest quilting cotton in the world is currently printed in Japan.

Meet the Next Gen of Japanese quilt artists. Japan’s history and cultural norms set very clear rules for who is and who is not considered a Master and this lecture will explain why, and how, that happens. But in the Japan 2.0 universe, there is a community of quilters for the 21st century who are operating outside the rigid cultural lines of the traditional Master/Student relationship. They are creating original, modern quilts with a global eye while still managing to reference the Japanese aesthetic.