Quilt Artistry: Inspired Designs from the East

By Yoshiko Jinzenji

Book Overview

Quilt Artistry will transform the way that readers think about quilts. Author Yoshiko Jinzenji began quilting after she came upon quilts made by Canada's Mennonite people and was deeply moved by their resonant, sacred quality. The richly minimalist quilts she makes today are as powerful as the works that originally inspired her. Quilt Artistry presents her unforgettable quilt creations in 100 color photos and in 300 black-and-white photos and diagrams. Detailed patterns and instructions are included for all projects shown.

In addition to full-size quilts, Jinzenji demonstrates how to make quilted pillows, clutch purses, necklaces, decorative objects, table mats, tiny miniature quilt "mandalas," even a hammock. There are a total of 90 projects, for everyone from beginners to the most advanced quilters.

Jinzenji is also a superb natural dyer and often makes quilts from fabric or fiber she colors herself, including very subtle and rich bamboo-dyed white silk.

In other quilts she uses antique fabric collected from around the world, and in still others vibrant tropical natural dyes or innovative synthetics such as black metallic cloth created by well-known textile designer Jun'ichi Arai. No matter what the material, her quilts all have a remarkable quiet power. They resonate with a spiritual quality like that of classic North American quilts, but one that is rooted in an Asian, even Buddhist sensibility.

Jinzenji has always wanted to "give something back" to the Western quilting tradition that first motivated her own work, and with this book she is wonderfully successful. Quiltmakers and all others with an interest in textiles or design will find Quilt Artistry as inspirational as it is practical.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 4770027567
• ISBN13: 9784770027566
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Kodansha USA
• Length: 136 Pages
• Weight: 2.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.6" x 12.3"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful.

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.

An exquisite portrait of an exquisite mind

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 handworkYoshiko'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

Beautiful!

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!