Amulet Day 91/100

Ayako Miyawaki was an avant-garde guard “rough-edge” appliqué artist who began her work after WW2 ended using any and all scraps and bits of cloth she could find—including used cloth coffee filters. She mostly created vegetables and fish but also flowers. 30 some years later (she was still working) the new Japanese quilt world got wind of her because the editor of Patchwork Quilt Tsushin, Yuko Watanabe, started putting images of her work on the inside cover. It didn’t take long before the fabric companies began producing copies of her style on printed fabric—which I bought wherever I could find it and sold it in my Japanese Fabric Club and at quilt shows across the nation. Thus this little 2” square is a special memento—though not of her hand. There was a show of her artwork at the Textile Museum in D.C. which I went to, and of course, the colors and rich textures were wildly better in person than with a catalogue. Who knows? It might still be out there somewhere. Little torii gate from Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto. Climbed that mountain many times…