Aqua Batik Hachi Style Quilt

Here’s another Hachi style quilt. This one was made as part of a project for our quilt guild.

If you’ve been following my blog recently you’ll know that Hachi style quilts always have an “unexpected visitor”. In this quilt, the visitor is readily apparent but not out of character with the either the quilt’s fabrics nor the design. The unexpected visitor in this quilt is the dark gold blocks. They do just what they are supposed to do—add a pop of color and add visual interest to the quilt.

The full length blue band is 4 inches wide, one of the dimensions allowed in a Hachi style quilt. I needed to add it to get the quilt to the requested width of at least 60 inches wide and 72 inches long.

If you are a new visitor to my blog, and want to learn more about Hachi style quilts, check out my post from November 4, 2021. This is my 4th Hachi style quilt in the past few months. The 8 inch blocks are quick to piece but offer endless design options. I’d had this a stack of batik fat quarters in my stash for several years never found a quilt pattern I wanted to make using them. But they were perfect for this project!

Urban Allotment Hachi Style Quilt

This is my Urban Allotment Quilt. I made it for my neighbors who created a rather unique little vegetable garden in their front yard. They are moving out of the city and will have lots of room for a really big garden on their new property. But this quilt will be a reminder of their little urban garden, which somehow, our neighborhood ground hog never found. One of life’s great mysteries!

I choose the grey borders because their garden is a cluster of round, raised bed, bordered by large rocks.

The rock surrounded raised beds on a snowy day.

I used the Bernina #4 stitch, increasing the stitch length to 2.5 to create the texture in the borders.

This is another quilt in the Japanese Hachi style. The unexpected guests are the chickens! They may be expected on a farm, but clearly not IN the vegetable patch!

The large blueberry print, the cherries and the sugar snap prints are all part of my Dogs at the Farmer’s Market Spoonflower Collection. And the backing of this quilt is the Dogs at the Farmer’s Market feature fabric. The Farmer’s Market is a major event in our urban village, and the print has 2 dogs who they know. More reminders of our neighborhood when they are at their new place!

Here’s the quilt back.

Back in 2015, I made another quilt using the Dogs at my Farmer’s Market Market, fussy cutting the fabrics to make the quilt blocks. This new quilt is very different and it was fun to use the fabrics in a new way.

Bright Solids and Flowers Hachi Quilt

Finish it February!! It’s a thing—spending the cold winter days quilting all the quilt tops that have accumulated during better weather and/or just before the holidays.

This is a Japanese Hachi quilt that I pieced last year and only just now got around to quilting it. The narrow strips remind and the rectangular blocks make me think of a Mondrian painting—even though my strips are colors and not black.

The bright flower print is a Kaffe Fassett print from the stash and the solids are all from Tula Pink’s line of solid fabrics.

Each Hachi quilt has an “unexpected visitor”, meant to add a spark of interest to the design. The line of water lily’s on the orange background are the very welcome, unexpected visitor in this quilt.

There are 3 types of quilting in this quilt. There is a lot of straight line quilting done with a walking foot. The flowers in the solid blocks are free motion quilting. And if you look very carefully, there is hand sewn big stitch quilting in most of the upright flower blocks. I used sashiko thread and a sashiko needle to do the hand stitching. The thread is almost exactly the same blue as the leaves in the print, so it’s only something you’d discover if you had the quilt on your lap!

I can’t see any of the big stitch quilting on the photo above, so here’s a close-up.

Hand sewn big stitch quilting done with sashiko thread.

It was funny gingerly walking across a snow powder-covered mound of crusty icy snow to hang this very summery quilt on the clothes line to photograph it. But I like the blue February sky and the grey-blue snow framing this quilt.

And this quilt—I love!! (Last week’s is growing on me too)!

A Ducky Hachi Quilt Top

I’m having fun sewing the Hachi Quilts I learned about reading Patricia Belyea’s book East-Meets-West Quilts. (See also my post on November 4, 2021).

This ducky fabric has been in my stash for years. The selvedge says this fabric was printed by Andover Fabrics back in 2006! It really is called “Duck Duck Goose!”

How many of you played Duck Duck Goose on the playground in elementary school?

I’ve pulled this fabric collection out of the bin a number of times when I wanted to make a baby quilt. Each time I chose something else and the ducks went back into the bin.

But when I was looking in the stash for fabrics to make a new Hachi Quilt, I was drawn to the tall ducks and geese. These fowl are really a linear design and I realized they would look great in these strip blocks.

Each Hachi Quilt needs an “unexpected visitor”. The sock monkey/number fabric is a perfect addition to a baby/toddler quilt. The bright red fabric is definitely a welcome pop of color.

I also added some of Karen Lewis’s Blueberry Park fabric which was printed commercially a few years ago by Robert Kaufman Fabrics.

I needed to piece two fabrics to make the backing for this quilt. That used up the remaining Duck Duck Goose fabric in the stash.

I’m thinking a rippling or wavelet quilting design might be perfect for this quilt. Look for a completed quilt sometime in early 2022! And an orange binding, for sure!

Making a quilt using the book "East-Meets-West Quilts" by Patricia Belyea

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.