East-Meets-West Quilts is a book which I just discovered. It’s not new, having been published by abramsbooks.com in 2017. The author, Patricia Belyea, has a shop, Okan Arts, which sells imported vintage Japanese yukata fabrics. She created this book using these lovely yukata fabrics.

All the blocks in her book finish at 8 inches, based on the Kanji character hachi. The main pieces in each block are fractions of 8…2s and 4s. The concept is simple but the possibilities are endless. One of the design concepts that Patricia introduced is the “unexpected visitor”—one block or several, which are completely different that all the other blocks in the quilt. This adds a element of surprise and delight to the quilt.

I went hunting through my stash looking for a floral fabric which would work in these blocks. Most of my fabrics are small scale, but I did find “Busy Lizzie”, a Kaffe Fassett print. I paired that print with the newly released solids by Tula PInk, Unicorn Poop and Dragon’s breath. All these fabrics are from FreeSpirit Fabrics. That’s an added bonus, as I expect they will all continue to play well as the quilt gets used.

Here are the blocks on my design wall. I used the pattern, “Hidden Wonders” from the book. However, my added strips were cut at 1 inch wide, so my strips are a tad wider than those in the pattern.

Part of my new quilt using a pattern from “East-Meets-West Quilts”

I was so glad that I took several pictures of this quilt before I pulled the blocks off the design wall to sew the quilt top together. Even though I had the blocks in order by row, I kept looking back to the photo to make sure i wasn’t turning the orientation of a block. (Even so, I still had to do a bit of “un-sewing”)!

While I was choosing a final layout, I also edited several photographs of possible layouts to grey scale to see if the colors were actually balanced throughout the quilt. There a few problems I can see in the layout below in the quilt on the left side. (It probably loads first if you are reading on a phone). First, the 2 large light patches in the upper left hand corner, I thought I could do better with several of the very dark blocks. I moved some blocks around and ended up with a much better balance. If you have a pattern that is variable, it really is worth taking the extra time to check the layout in grey scale.

So much fun! I’ll have the completed top for you to see in my post next week.