Quilting with Japanese Taupe Fabrics

When I attended my first international quilt show, I was really delighted to see the fabrics from around the world and some of the fabrics that most impressed me were the taupe fabrics from Japan. But as I looked at 'em, the colors were so different and the textures were so different than what I'm used to in the fabrics that we purchase here in the United States, I wasn't sure how to use 'em. I bought a few pieces and then kind of put 'em in my drawer. I'm guessing some of you have done the same thing or you've looked at 'em and thought those are really lovely, but I don't see how they're gonna fit in my quilts. I'm gonna give you some ideas about how to use them. I'm gonna tell you where the colors in those fabrics come from, and I'm gonna talk to you about the textures and how you can build those into your quilt making. The textiles that are called taupe in Japan are not taupe as we think of it in the United States. If I say taupe to you, you're probably thinking of kind of a color in the beige range. And while Japanese taupe fabrics include beige, they also actually include a whole rainbow of colors. They're just kind of milky, subtle colors, much different than what we're used to working with. The colors in the taupe are the colors that come from the land in Japan and I'm gonna share with you a piece of pottery that comes from Okayama, Japan. The pottery's called Bizen wear or Bizen-yaki in Japanese, and it is a piece of pottery. The pottery is made with a clay, starts out kind of a gray, and it's used with firewood and ash in the firing process. It can be glazed, but the colors do not come from the glaze. The colors come from what's in the clay as it reacts to the ash and the heat from the firewood. And you end up with this whole range of colors. And those colors then are colors that the Japanese people have in their hearts and their souls, they're colors that come from the land where they live and the Bizen-yaki is pottery that is very special to them. It's been made for thousands of years and many Japanese families will have one or two pieces that they only bring out for major celebrations. Now, I wanna show you this rainbow of color that comes from the pottery. And so we have here a piece of the Bizen ware and I'm going to show you some of the fabrics that relate to that. So we can begin, we'll start from the upper corner of the pottery. And you can see that it's kind of a black or gray-type color and it begins to merge kind of into a little bit of a red or a very muted kind of a magenta color. And so this particular fabric has that black and then you can see it, actually, if you look close, you can see a touch of that magenta. It kind of moves into a bit of a gray and a gray with a little touch of blue to it. And then it goes on down into some speckles of that magenta. And as I said, you can't, no two pieces of the Bizen ware are going to be the same because it comes from the firing process. And so each one'll be a little different but the colors I'm showing you are colors that you will see often. It goes on down where the kind of magenta and the gray began to mix together and then into kind of a true gray, as you can see, and it just kind of continues to build. And, if you notice, it begins to pick up a touch of blue as it goes, and then you have a band of green. And so you begin to merge into the greens and the greens go from kind of a light green, and they begin to get just a bit darker as you go on down the piece. And then you're into a brown, kind of a dark, a little bit of a darker brown. We might tend to call that kind of a chocolate brown, when you get to the darkest pieces of it. And, as you can see, brown is not one color, but many colors, as you're looking at the taupe fabrics. And then it moves into some kind of lighter colors and it moves into some warm colors. We've been in the cool color range. And we end up in the end in a very warm color range, kind of what we would call a rust color. So you can see that what is considered Japanese taupe fabric is far from a beige fabric family. It is, in fact, a whole rainbow of color and that rainbow of color comes, our rainbow that we think of comes from the sky. This rainbow comes from the earth. Now you've seen the colors. Another thing you need to be looking at is the textures in these fabrics. The other key difference in these fabrics from what we're used to with the fabrics we purchase here in the United States is the texture. So the fabrics tend to have some raised surfaces on them. They tend to have different kinds of threads used. It's not one consistent thread. Now some of the taupes will be a smooth cotton like we're used to, and those taupes will, in fact, be printed fabrics as we're used to. And as you know with a printed fabric, you see the color on the front, and when you turn it to the back, you can tell that the color was printed on one side. So within the taupe family, there are some fabrics produced in the way we're used to, but there's also many of the fabrics that are produced by what we call yarn dying. And that means that the color is not printed onto it, but rather woven into the fabric. And the fabric, oftentimes the threads that are used, are actually dyed. So when you look at a piece of fabric like the one I have here, the fabrics where you see the lighter brown sections, the fabric was actually dyed dark brown, light brown, dark brown, light brown as you moved across the fabric to get that appearance in terms of the yarn dyes. Now, the yarn dyes are different to us because they appear to be a little bit coarser, because they have the texture. And we're also often concerned, in the United States, that they're gonna ravel but I will be showing you that, in fact, when you work with them, that will be a very minimal problem. They won't ravel any more than the fabrics you're actually used to working with. Now, when we look at this range of color, my first impression when I saw it was well, you know, that's awfully similar to some of the traditional U.S. fabric, some of the kind of prairie colors that many people like to work with, that many of our grandmothers worked with. And we think we know those colors, but lemme show you a range of those colors. You can begin to see that our colors and the Japanese colors, there's some significant differences. And one of the things I was interested in was when I got home with my Japanese taupes and I tried to sort them with my other fabrics by color, there was nothing in my U.S. fabrics that were the same colors. It really is a unique color range that comes from another culture. And so it does, in a way, challenge us to learn how to work with it. But, and we think at first it's kind of a narrow range because it's subtle color. And as you can see in our U.S. fabrics, we're used to a bit more contrast from color to color. And we're used to a little more intensity and boldness in our colors. So working with a little bit softer color range may be different for many of us when we begin to try to work with the taupe. And so I recommend that a good place to start in working with the taupe is to begin to look at what the Japanese quilt makers are doing with the taupe and the Japanese quilt makers. There are several very well known quilt makers who work with the taupe, and I want to share with you some of their work. And this one is a really good example. This is a quilt that was made. It's a small wall hanging, was made by a woman named Reiko Kato. Reiko is one of the leading quilt teachers in Japan. She has a shop in Tokyo and in Japan, when you take quilting classes, you sign on for a two-year course of study and you come for four hours once a month and you go home and you make whatever you worked on in class and come back. So becoming a quilt maker in Japan is a very long course of study. And so Reiko teaches that and she works almost exclusively with taupes when she does that. Now you can see, in this piece by Reiko, that what she has done is she has created layers as she has put this together. Japanese quilt making will include piecing. So in this piece, you will see that she has pieced the top and the bottom. While those are both fabrics that are in a similar color range, they are different and she creates a very specific horizon line with using the two different colors of the beiges in that. And then she does applique for the remainder of her design. Now, when she told me this was applique and I began to look at the yarn dyes and think, appliqueing with yarn dyes would be really difficult because appliqueing with yarn dyes I thought would mean it would fray. But what you have to do is you have to look at the nature of the Japanese applique, which is quite different than the way we do applique in the United States. In the United States, we will work with the printed cottons and we want a very crisp edge. We'll often iron under or glue under the edges, use freezer paper, or another kind of a template to wrap our applique pieces around and we'll want them to be very flat to the surface. And while we may layer some things, we're not layering in order to build levels as much as we simply have to layer to get the different pieces together. Whereas in Japan, the layering very much has the purpose of building a perspective of things that some of them appear more forward and others backward. And one of the ways that this is achieved is that they do a very smooth kind of applique. You'll see very few corners turned in a Japanese applique. And so they will stitch, like we do with the applique, they do what we call needle turn. They do work with their needle to turn it under but when you're working with it, and you will have had this experience if you've done hand applique, when they're working with the fabrics, they may end up with kind of a point and you can see a point like that right here on my applique. You can see where there's a point. And I really want that to be round. One of the things that Reiko Kato taught me was that it's actually in some ways easier to applique with the yarn dyes, because when you get there, you're working with threads that you can actually just turn that under and you can get that to be a more rounded edge. Sometimes you'll need to actually take a needle to tuck in under, but often, as you see, all you'll need to do is simply push it under and it'll smooth. And that's something that, with our printed cottons here in the United States, is almost impossible to do. And so by working in that kind of a way, you can see the very smooth edges that the Japanese quilt makers get when they do their appliques. One of the other fun things to notice about this particular piece is that she's taken the yarn dyes and she's looked at the patterns in them. So, for example, the little girl that has the green plaid jacket she's put that on a bias so that it looks, it gives this really nice pattern in that. And the little girl in the blue coat, she's cut around where the flowers are in the fabric. So there's a lot of fun things you can do with the various yarn dye fabrics and I encourage you to try the applique with them. And just one note about this particular pattern, if this looks a little familiar this is based on the Sunbonnet Sue patterns. But if you look close, you'll notice that the Sues are dressed a bit different. We're used to Sues that have the prairie bonnets, the Conestoga wagon bonnets, that pioneers here wore across the country in the United States. Whereas here, the bonnets on these are the traditional bonnets the farmers in Japan would wear. So, so much of quilting we borrow from one culture to another and then we make it our own. And that's what Reiko Kato has done with her Sunbonnet Sues and making them in the yarn dyes is very different look than when they're made in our calicos here in the United States. Now another really well-known Japanese quilt maker and teacher is Yoko Saito and Yoko Saito works almost exclusively with the taupe fabrics, with a lotta the yarn dyes. And she, in doing that, she often will make quilts that we would call like one-color quilts. And I wanna show you a few of those. When she began her quilt making, she very much was working with very traditional patterns from the United States. And you can see that here in this particular quilt, but the color scheme of this is so very different because she has used the Japanese color aesthetic by using the taupe fabrics. And this one, you do see a lot of the rainbow here, but here's one where you see a lot of brown. This particular one is our log cabin pattern but I'll tell you, along the edge, that looks a lot more like a door or a window that you would see on a home in Japan and the colors, you would look at this and we'd say that's a brown quilt. And then when you begin to look closer, you'll see some oranges, you'll see some golds, you'll see some range of colors. And in the border, you'll even see a bit of the blues and the grays, but all of them very muted from the color range of the taupes. And, more recently, Yoko Saito has been teaching a lot in Scandinavia. And she said, you know where you go to teach impacts your color. So she has begun designing taupe fabrics that have much more of the blue and gray range and the white range, which she has seen when she has been in Scandinavia. And so many of her newer quilts actually have that kind of blue-gray range. Now, just like the applique, much of her work is applique. And you can see up close here just a little bit of it. She's done applique but the other thing that is a hallmark of the Japanese quilting is all of the hand embroidery that goes on it. So you've used the yarn dyes to create the texture and now you've added even more surface texture and design by doing another layer with the embroidery. And you can see that many of her flowers have been created that way. Now the color in these quilts is so subtle, it can often be difficult to see, but this particular quilt here, you can see. It has pinks, it has blues, it has greens. It has a whole range of colors, but they're very, very subtle. And so I think looking at Japanese quilts is a great exercise for U.S. quilt makers because you have to spend a bit more time with them to actually see the whole range of colors that are there. So if you're interested in working with the taupe fabrics I would tell you that a really great place to start is to make a pattern by one of the Japanese quilt makers. And we're very lucky that we now actually have several books in English with patterns you can work from. And so Reiko Kato's "Garden Party", which first came out in Japanese, is now available in English and you can find it at your local quilt shop perhaps. You can find it online. And we also have Yoko Saito's book, "Past & Present My Quilting Life" and both of these have some great small patterns where you can begin to practice working with the taupes. And I think that's a good place to start. If you start by making some of the Japanese patterns, you'll begin to understand the aesthetic of this particular range of colors and textures. Once you've done that, now you're ready to begin to think about how can you use the taupes in a way that's authentic to your quilt making style? When I was in Japan last, I have family in Japan and my daughter-in-law's from Kyoto, Japan, and she's getting ready to move to the United States and she's a little nervous about leaving her home country. So I thought, wouldn't it be nice if she'd take a piece of Japan with her? So I showed her lots of different colors to use and one of those was the Japanese taupe. I wanted to let her decide. Well, the minute she saw the taupe, she said, oh, that fabric is my heart, that fabric's my soul, that's the fabric I want. And so we began to talk and she really liked the color range that was in the blue and gray color range. So we decided we would work with the blues and the grays and then she wanted something actually very neutral. So the first thing I did was to try to find the fabric that would work for the quilt she wanted. And so we started with the neutrals. Now, when I show you these fabrics, at first, when you look at 'em, you may think, well, those are just all beige, but what I encourage you to do as you look at these is to see that beige is not beige is not beige, but rather it can be a whole range of different shades and different textures and different patterns. And so we began to pick out some that we thought would look nice in her quilt. And, as you can see, these are yarn dyes. And then once we had 'em, we began to say which were the ones we would put into the quilt and we made a selection from these. Once we had the beiges in place. Now it was time to decide how we would do the blues. And so we began to look at the blue fabrics. And again, as you look at these, you're going to say, gee, those are kind of all the same blue-gray range, but, again, it has to do with putting the subtleness together. And some of these just have some, as you can see, some wonderful, wonderful texture in them. Some of these are just really, really fun. They add a lot of lines. And, as I said, sometimes there's the printed cottons. So we wanted to work a few of those in there because that accents even more the raised textures of many of the yarn dyes. So as you can see, we ended up with a whole range of the blue grays, also to use. Once we had the fabrics in place, my next challenge was to decide what the design would be. The Japanese aesthetic is a pretty simple design. And so I thought, I'm not Japanese, I cannot copy that aesthetic, but what from our culture might be in the same keeping? So the next step was to design a quilt that would be true to how I make quilts, but would use the fabric and also be true to some of the simpler aesthetic that we're used to in the Japanese quilts. So I had my fabric and I decided, let me work on a design. And as I began to look at possibilities for designs, what occurred to me was that the whole modern quilt movement here in the United States is about simplicity. It's about more subtle color. It's about larger blocks. It's about a piece that doesn't have too much going on in terms of the piecing, which was very true to the Japanese tradition in many, many ways. And so I designed a bed runner for her bed and this piece is 104 inches long, it's a king-size bed, by 24 inches wide. It'll go across the foot of the bed. And then I began, once I had my design in place, then I began to put it into fabric. And this is really a fun project. I encourage you to try something like this. You could do it as a table runner as place mats, as a bed runner, but I began to pick up all these different beiges that we had selected. And as you can see, they're very similar, and when you look at it from a distance, it looks like a beige with some pops of the blue grays and some browns. But when you look at it close, it has lots of texture and different colors going on in those fabrics that are all very similar colors. And it was a lot of fun as I worked to then say, okay, how do I play with the textures, put some textures in. And I also think this is a good project to start with because it's simple. You're not trying to manipulate fabric you're unfamiliar with in unusual ways. You're not trying to cut little tiny pieces. And if you are concerned about that the yarn dyes may ravel, you'll very quickly learn that they won't, but you're working with big pieces where that will not be much of a challenge at all. And so this is the bed runner that I made. I really encourage you to try working with the Japanese taupe fabrics. They are fabrics that, when we see them, we wanna touch them. We say, wow, those are lovely. And then we say, how do we use 'em? So I hope I've given you a few ideas of how to use them, some places to start. And if you're wondering where you can get these fabrics, check with your local quilt shop. Some local quilt shops do carry these fabrics. And if there's a demand for them, they can get them. And you'll also be able to find them online.