Enduring Memories: More Reflections on the Tokyo Quilt Show

The more I think about it, that quilt that captured the biggest chunk of my time, attention, and heart at the Tenth Annual Tokyo Quilt Show was not a baby quilt but a scrapbook quilt.

I've had lots of time to think about it, too, while culling through the hundreds of photographs my friends and I snapped at the Tokyo Dome that day. No one but me seems to have taken a picture of that quilt and, alas, I found the details so attractive and compelling that apparently I forgot to step back for a second and capture the entirety of the piece.

The best I show you in a single glance is roughly a quarter of the quilt.

Masako Wakayama calls her creation "My Quilt Journeys".  Right away we see she's been to Paris, New York, and India (those elephants on the left).  The messages on those muslin postcards are written in English.  Although I'd be hard-pressed to say exactly why, I have the sense the postcards are addressed to her children.



The colors Wakayama used are the same shades I used in the family room of our Rockbridge Avenue house in Norfolk. Maybe that's why the quilt caught my eye.


A second wave of nostalgia washed over me when I read "People travel to search for what they want and return home to find it."  I hope that turns out to be the case for me.  But wait!  Wakayama reminds me I want to visit Shanghai and Russia first.

This week my friends and I plan to visit Nippori Textile Town in Tokyo. Maybe I should stock up on more fabric with an eye toward creating a scrapbook quilt to help me remember my years in Japan.

The Ancient Mariner is handier with a needle and thread than I will ever be. Perhaps I can just design the quilt and convince him to do the actual work . . .