Monday 16 August 2010

Festival of Quilts preparations

Over the next two days, there are all the little jobs to do - new signs to print, velcro to go on the back of my new "patchwork" decoupage name sign (from Stuck on You Designs - see link at right), kimono to sort and final decisions over what to take for sales and what to leave at home.

As I'm going as a trader at this show, I will not be taking a lot of kits or books, although I'll have some. I am focusing on the fabrics instead. On Saturday, we packed lots of "£2 treats" (20cm cuts of kimono silk) and half metre pieces of the same silks, hoping this will reduce the amount of small pieces to cut when the show gets busy. But with only 2m x 2.5m for the stand space, there's only so much that can be displayed. For the fabrics I will mostly take silks, including tsumugi, with some yukata cottons, as these are mostly what quilters go for. There will be some wools, as I will take the fabrics used for the Masu quilt (first photo below), although, if I am going to display the "Hakone Yosegi" parquetry sampler quilt from "Japanese Quilt Blocks to Mix and Match", there won't be enough space to show Masu as well - they are both big quilts.



I have some lovely vintage cottons suitable for taupe quilts, several subtle checks in browns, plus some fantastic 1950s & 60s futon cover fabrics in various colours and designs, and some checked and striped old fashioned yukata cottons, c. 1960s. These are all "new" (as in new in stock!) and I want to make sure they get an outing all together. These kinds of fabrics are full of nostaglia for Japanese people and are becoming very difficult to find - they are certainly one offs. I just hope that the festival visitors appreciate them as much as I do.



3 comments:

Angela said...

I can't wait to see all your wonderful fabrics Susan! I've still got the ones I bought last year...I don't want to cut them up!!

shigatsuhana said...

Wow! What a fantastic collection! I also can't wait to see it. I see one I really quite like. Hmmmm.... :)

Susan Briscoe said...

My efforts at trawling Yahoo! Japan Auctions will be revealed on Thursday - that's where many of these lovely vintage cottons came from. For those who don't know, it is a Japanese eBay type of site, only far more scary to use.