'Tis the Season: Yokohama Quilt Festival

The stockings are hung on the  sideboard with care, the scent of Yankee Candle's Mountain Pine is in the air, and the front and side fences are tastefully festooned with lights.  The ornaments are on the tree, a process I actually managed to enjoy this year once I quit grousing about the choreness of the task and embraced my inner nostalgia wallower.  As I draped and tucked the ten yards of burgundy brocade that's passed as a faux tree skirt for the past decade, I chuckled through my annual mantra:  By next year I will quilt a real tree skirt.
   
Ah, yes.  This is where I segue to the Yokohama Quilt Festival which I visited with some friends on the day after Thanksgiving.  This was my third year of experiencing this annual extravaganza at the Pacifico convention center in Minato-mirai.  Everything about it continues to appeal to me although I talked myself out of buying three tons of fabric this time.  I'm still working up the nerve to slice up the six tons of fabric I brought home last year.

Here are some of the quilts that caught my eye. If you aren't interested in quilts, don't bother looking. But if you are interested, please bear in mind that at least half the quilts on display were off-limits to photographers. So what you are seeing is the tip of the iceberg.

As is so often the case these days, getting to the quilt show was half the fun. The dozen or so times I've been to Minato-mirai in the past, I've switched from train to subway in Yokohama and landed in the basement of the shopping center at the foot of Landmark Tower. This time Yuko met us halfway to Yokohama and suggested changing to a local train. We debarked at Hinode-cho station then strolled a pleasant ten minutes to our destination.

No, we did not check out this pie shop. Yet.