Patchwork and quilting friends

I have a couple more beautiful quilts to show you today...

This week I got a surprise package in the mail from Mrs. Furui, my long-time patchwork mentor and with whom I've not really done any patchwork since the beginning of Covid.  Our little group of 6 shut down during the pandemic and we haven't gotten back together since...  I had sort of thought that as many good things do, it had faded away because we were all busy with different types of lives...  I see  Mrs. Furui occasionally but it's been a long time since we had an all day quilting fest.

So what was the package that came in the mail?  A quilt!!!  Made with wishes for a speedy surgery recovery by all my quilting friends and a couple more!

What a beautiful reminder of all the love that I have behind me with Bible verses, lines from hymns, cute cat embroidery and little snippets reminding me of quilts we have made together in the past. I hope you can zoom in to see all the details and well wishes both in English and in Japanese.

Eight friends particpated in making this quilt (which probably was mostly put together by Mrs. Furui after collecting finished blocks) and I was surprised to see Keiko Suga's and Marlene's names on the back of the quilt along with the others.  They are both not quilters but Mrs. Furui contacted them and included them in the project!  

Seeing this really lifts up my heart and makes we want to get back into meeting up with my friends and making things together again with them!  Only three more weeks to go!

Another quilt that I want to show is M-san's.  She discovered a blog? video? with this pretty machine quilting pattern and she wanted to give it a try.  She put this together all by herself and very humbly showed me the finished product saying that she "only copied" what the thread artist had done and she couldn't do it by herself!  Oh my goodness!!!  M-san is a thread artist now and she doesn't even recognize it in herself!  Isn't this beautiful!!!  

"I just did what the quilter was doing.  I can't create something like this myself..."

I think M-san becomes uncomfortable when I praise her too much or when I suggest that she really is an amazing quilter and has such a future of creativity in front of her.  She says that machine quilting makes her nervous and her true love is hand-quilting.  I somewhat understand that as it is always a challenge to see if something is going to work out, but in the end, it always becomes a step in learning so I wish M-san would enjoy the process more.  She is exceptional!

You can see the detail even better from the back.  

M-san offered to give me her beautiful quilt but I said that she needed to keep it for her family and friends to admire, to be able to look back on it as her starting point as a thread artist, and maybe to be able to use it as an example when teaching others someday.  I am very proud of her and she should be too!

So those are two quilts that have meant a lot to me this week.