Anemoona's dagboek

My friend Gert (who used to be on LJ back when!), who is an avid quilter, is showing some of his work at the Bartholomeus Gasthuis in Utrecht, together with Maria, his former boss from when he worked in a quilt fabric store. We went to the opening, and after cutting the ribbon, Gert showed every quilt to us and explained some things about the fabric and techniques used, but also what he wanted to express with that quilt.



“Real Men Stitch” says this one, made as a banner, so it has rounded corners at the bottom.

This is his “Japanese treasure boxes” quilt, using upcycled kimono fabric for the colourful ‘treasures’ in the boxes made with the dark fabric. Most of his work is very colourful, and you can see how his work has become more and more expressive in colour, shape and theme. Really great to see these together to see the progression.



He always works very precise (something he learned from his large-scale cross-stitching embroidery work), and this is the only ‘improvised’ quilt on display. With the technique you make ‘random’ triangles of fabric and create rectangles from them, so that it always fits together. It’s like fir trees on a mountain range.



The cool thing about this 3D effect is that with this orientations, the boxes seem to come out of the background, but if you turn it around, the boxes seem to be indents in the larger boxes!



Some of his more recent work expresses his identity as a gay man, celebrating the work of Erwin Olaf and Harvey Fierstein. The Erwin Olaf quilt includes “pockets” made of tulle fabric after every ‘F’ block where a postcard with a photo from Erwin Olaf has been inserted.





He worked very hard to finish this quilt for the exposition, titled “Adam and Steve” (iykyk). It shows the couple Adam and Steve living on their farm, surrounded by their livestock and flowers and portraits of their friends. (They must live in a warm climate, none of them wear shirts…) The background fabric is toile de jouy, which has these idyllic arcadian scenes — but always with a man and a woman. So this is a delicious subversion and commentary on heteronormativity.



There’s more, and Maria’s quilts are also varied and completely different, which makes it a must-see for the quilt-lover in your life. Admission is free and the expo is until the end of September.



If you want to see more of Gert’s work, simply search for “real men stitch” and you’ll find it!

I managed to get 3,5 weeks of PTO in October/November. I haven’t been taking a lot of PTO so I still had quite a few days saved up, even from two years back, and when I explained to my (American) manager how the PTO system works in the Netherlands she was keen on me using up some of those days. She and my direct colleague were OK with me taking that many days off, so that’s what I applied for — and what got approved. I wanted some extra days, because with Russian airspace closed for European air traffic, flights to Japan take much longer! So you’d spend two days on the trip instead of one, so you’d “lose” two days at your destination. So with 3,5 weeks of PTO, we’d net 3 weeks in Japan.

It’s been 7 years since we were last in Japan! Tourism to Japan is booming, but we’ve already seen the hotspots so we don’t have to do the “golden route” of Tokyo – Kyoto – Osaka. Instead, we’ve become interested in Tohoku, the region up north on the main island of Honshu. We’d fly into Tokyo Haneda airport, spend one night in Tokyo before taking the shinkansen to Sendai, the largest city in Tohoku. We’d spend a few days there, seeing the sights of Sendai and visiting Yamadera and Matsushima (one of the top three views in Japan!) with Sendai as our base of operations. After that, we’d rent a car and go into the country-side! With stops at Zao, a few days in Yonezawa and a few days in Aizuwakamatsu before returning to the coast and following that up back to Sendai. We’re closing off with a week in Tokyo to rest up from all the travel and to visit some interesting districts and shops in Tokyo itself, before flying back from Narita.

Finding things to see and do is relatively easy, and the tourism promotion from those prefectures and cities is doing a good job of showing off their highlights. But booking hotels is a bit of a challenge. It’s easy to find hotels, but not every hotel has a website in English. Of course, you can use translation tech to turn that into English, but I am hesitant to use those during the actual booking — what if there is an error in the translation and I’m booking the wrong thing? As a rule, I try to book at the hotel site directly, because I dislike intermediaries. But a few times now I have had to hold my nose and book through an English intermediary website because otherwise I would not have been able to book. In the “countryside” (the Tohoku accents are used as shorthand for “country bumpkin” in Japanese media…) the number of overseas tourists is relatively low and not every hotel is able to make the investment for an English-language version of their website.

I’ve also been booking twin rooms. It’s not as cozy to sleep in two separate beds, but our regular bed is 2m wide — and in Japan a 1m40 wide bed is considered a “double”, it’s just not comfortable for us. We do have some rooms with tatami, where you’d lay out your futon by yourself, so there we have a bit more flexibility.