Customer Reviews

Quilt Artistry: Inspired Designs from the East

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Yoshiko Jinzenji has made a beautiful book showing her magnificient quilts and pieces of fabric arts.

The book itself, photos, paper, printing, writing, style, is a piece of art. A book you will be happy to own, no matter if you are a quilter or just a book lover. A perfect coffee table book for any home, though this one is so much more than a coffee table book. This book deserves to be read and be looked through again and again.

Yoshiko Jinzenji has been a quilter for a lifetime, and during these years she has developed her own unique and perfect style. We get to know Jinzenji through the pages of the book, both through words and through pictures. We meet her and her quilts in Kyoto, and we meet her in her studio in Bali. The book also have a section on how to make quilts, easy to read, easy to follow the step by step instructions. Jinzenji makes her quilts from ancient fabric collected from around the world, and she makes her quilts from natural dyes in light, clean colors. But no matter what the fabric is, her vibrant quilts all stand out and have all their own story to tell

The highlights in the book though are the pictures. The somewhat clean and stylish picture of a Small Modern Amish quilt displayed on the wall in her Kyoto home, the fantastic puzzle of an uncountable number of small Mandala quilts put together to form a universe in colors, cloths and patterns, the collague of many pictures from scenes around her studio in Bali as inspirations for future quilts.

The way the writing and photos in the book are put together shows the reader a new way to look at the surroundings, and through that a new way to look at life. Or to say it with the words from the foreword of the book, written by textile designer Jun'ichi Arai; I am convinced that Yoshiko Jinzenji's achievements in establishing a new genre in quilting will never be forgotten.

This book is beautifully written and designed. The cover and paper used are artful. Yoshiko Jenzenji shares her passion for quilting in a way that weaves a common thread through cultures, locales, nature, and spirituality. I could feel my heart swell as I read through this book and as I looked at and studied the photographs. This is a book about her quilts and about quilting--but the photography and artistry of its cover and between its covers makes it a special treasure. I am excited to own this book and will be proud to display it. I am so inspired by Yoshiko Jenzenji's quilt work and passion for quilting. I became dizzy with inspiration! I will recommend it to every friend I have--and not all of them are quilters! I would think they would all want to BECOME quilters after experiencing this book. Yoshiko Jenzenji seemed to open her heart and her home with this book. I am thankful to her for sharing her passion and talent with the world!

A piece of fabric is the pulse of life is written across our eyes by drape, shape, texture, and hue. Art forms, and perhaps art itself, have their own genetic codes-forms of doubling and redoubling that, as DNA does with the cell, determine a look, a feel, a character, an emotion. Lucky, then, are the pieces of fabric doubled and redoubled by the eyes and hands of Yoshiko Jinzenji. A few snips of color and weave become a mix of art and the irrepressible urge to adorn that make you want to dive off this world and into what you see.

She best articulates the origins of all this in her book's Introduction:

"I have a very clear memory of my first encounter with quilts. It was in Toronto in the winter of 1970, in the furniture section of Eaton's department store downtown. There, surrounded by standardized fluffy bedspreads, were two handmade quilts draped over wooden racks. I went over to them as if drawn by a magnet and took them in my hand, wondering what on earth these handmade quilts were doing in the middle of a display of manufactured goods. The oddity of the combination was stunning. The quilts were made by joining together many small pieces of cloth and then covering the whole with fine hand stitching. Each had a price tag, and I was stunned again to see that they were not much more expensive than the manufactured spreads. Who could have made these, I asked myself, and what had inspired their beautiful handwork

Yoshiko's work is a textile manifestation of the preoccupation with apres-antique and avant-garde that characterizes so much of Japanese culture today. On page 40 she recounts the symbiosis of ancient textiles in the tea ceremony; a scant 7 pages further on were are suddenly confronted with a work made of some of the most interesting cloth ideations of Jun'ichi Arai. Jun'ichi is arguably the most innovative and certainly the most influential textile creative artist working today-the textile equivalent of Issey Miyake's fabrications in his heyday of two decades ago. Jun'ichi has taken the marriage of technology and history further down the road to progeny than any other designer. He also is an astonishingly good and sensitive writer, and his Foreword to Yoshiko's book is so good that it is reproduced below.

Yoshiko, like Jun'ichi, is nothing if not a creative technician who happens to make art. Her text and caption content sums to an amazingly low overall word count given the amount of detail and philosophy it conveys. One reason is the lush plates-many so good they could be enlarged and hung in a gallery devoted to contemporary fine-art photography. Then there are the dozens of step-by-step how-to diagrams that guide the home quilter through the process of emulating Yoshiko's pieces. The readers need not be especially accomplished sewers, either, for despite their complex look, Yoshiko's pieces are really composed of fairly straightforward elements lines and patterns; there's just a lot of them. Any who would re-create one of her works at home needs patience more than proficiency.

Yoshiko is generous enough to pass along step-by-step instructions for a dyeing method she found via experiment in order to accomplish what must be the ultimate coals-to-Newcastle notion in textile history: dyeing white material white. That might seem an exercise in conceit, but the reason goes far back into the wellsprings of Japanese aesthetics. As she tells it,

"I had been making quilts for years from fabrics that I dyed myself with natural dyes when I had a kind of awakening. It was during an exhibition where my work was being shown together with that of a lacquerware artist. When I looked at his pieces, with their simple and beautiful form and their quiet sheen achieved by applying lacquer in careful layers, I thought, what kind of fabric could I make that would have the same sense of power? Finally it came to me, I wanted to find a natural dye that would dye cloth white. . . . In the field of natural dyes white was the one color no one knew how to obtain. For me white was suggestive of the fusuma and shoji sliding doors used to separate Japanese-style rooms, as well as the traditions of sumi ink drawings and calligraphy and even the white sand of Zen gardens."

"Finally I hit on the idea of trying that strange combination of tree and grass, bamboo. Two or three hours later the cloth had been transformed. It was if the silk was a prism sparkling with colors like pink, yellow, and green. It was a white with depths."

Yoshiko's book is a combination of high art and ladle-in-the-dyebath practicality. The many full-plate and even more part-page pictures amply illustrate the first. The drawings and text take care of the latter. With so many active quilters and societies all around the world these days, few would argue that quilting isn't an art form. With Yoshiko's book in hand, anyone interested in quilting, textiles, home design, or fashion design will be inspired to make art of their own. Her 90 specific projects, clear design patterns and detailed instructions can guide just about anyone with enthusiasm and patience to make quilts, pillows, clutch purses, mandalas, spreads, wall hangings, and even a hammock to end all hammocks. Yoshiko's work is a rarity even in the world of art-to-wear and its nonwearable textile art relatives: utterly unique.

What I had hoped for was a book that showcased the use of traditional fabrics from Japan. And while there are some "mandala" quilt blocks (5 7/8 inch each) that are made from antique Japanese, Phillipino, Indian and Indonesian fabrics along with some instructions on how to piece a kimono into a small quilt without wasting any of the fabric, the vast majority of the book showcases work done with either vanguard textiles by Junichi Arai or silk fabric handwoven and dyed with natural dyes found in Indonesia. Some of the works are extraordinary; some are quite mediocre.

Jinzenji's best works are full size quilts in white or pale colors with little or no patchwork piecing that are so densely quilted it is the sewn surface's shape and lines that that attract and hold the eye. Other works, with names like "Sound" and "Dew," and "Color" borrow from the American Amish and prairie quilting traditions in their use of grid layouts and techniques like log cabin and seminole piecing. Jinzenji calls some of her works "engineered," and indeed, they are quite "technical" in appearance and in the quality of the workmanship. These are very beautiful quilts, and the drawings presented with some of them should make it possible for an intermediate quilter to produce similar works. How she pieced the mandala blocks with the vintage textiles into tiny 5 7/8 inch blocks remains a mystery to me even after reading through the book. All of the blocks were complex patterns with many pieces--one of them had 81 pieces. Making a block that is less than 6 inches on each side with that many pieces would be just about impossible even if one sews them by hand, as Jinzenji recommends.

I was not inspired by her attempts at braiding or quilting objects like hammocks, pillows or placemats. I thought these looked amateurish and unfinished. Nevertheless, this is a very beautiful book that does have a place in quilter's library as inspiration for certain kinds of techniques.

Even if you never plan to make a quilt, this book is worth having simply to enjoy the inspired designs. The photography is wonderful, which enhances the stunning artistry of the quilts. And if you DO want to make a quilt, this book should inspire. The author gives instructions as well as history. Lovely.

The quilts in this book were made with hand woven and hand dyed silk, with incredible textured designs. The photography is so beautiful, the setting serene and relaxing, exquisite.

This is not just a book about quilt design but also a spiritual journey. It is philosphical in it's approach to the design process and uses innovative and cutting edge materials and construction methods. The materials may not be available in this country but I doubt one would want to copy her work but rather use the ideas for one's own work and journey. Before the recent catastraphic events in Japan I certainly would have considered making the trek to study with the auther.

I saw this book in the library of the town where my mother lives. As soon as I saw it I knew I wanted my own copy. I love the texture that quilting creates and this book is inspirational. Beautiful photographs and the drawn diagrams, while rather small in scale, provide lots of quilting ideas to try.

The unique quilt art of Yoshiko Jinzenji provides fine geometric shapes and designs that blend mandalas and other Asian symbols into their structure - but that's not all. Finding new work materials is part of Jinzenji's approach to producing series designs and even quilts made from fabrics and materials she's dyed herself: color photos pack a survey filled with color, cultural insight, and step-by-step how-to instruction.