A quilt honoring the Japanese women in Kanazawa, Japan, who not only taught me Ikebana but also how to manage a Japanese home more than forty years ago.  Made from Peppered Cottons (a soft loosely woven cotton), commercial embroidery designs from OESD for the Sashiko embroidered blocks, digitally painted flowers printed on cotton and arranged in situ on the quilt top in the Japanese style vase constructed from hand dyed dupioni silk.

This quilt I started while attending one of Ricky Tims Retreats in LaVeta in 2014.  This quilt had been on my bucket list since I first saw Ricky in Paducah in 2007.  His passion for quilting and his passion for this style plus the fact that it was using hand dyed batiks...made it a quilt I just had to someday make!  This quilt won first place in the Kansas City Regional Quilt Festival in June 2015, 3rd place in it's division in the AQS Grand Rapids Show in 2015.  It won first place in the AQS Show in it's division in Des Moines.  The quilt is entered in the AQS show in Daytona Florida and also in the AQS show in Paducah in 2016...we'll wait and see how it does there.  As my quilter, Dorie Hruska says....it's a fun ride!

With this quilt I challenged myself to expand upon my previous experiences making complex kaleidoscopes. First, I wanted to try making bigger, off-center kaleidoscopes--a major pattern drafting challenge. Second, I wanted to have my scopes to appear on a "whole cloth" printed background. This required piecing the squares containing the large circular scopes so they appear to be seamless. When the big scopes were done, the design was lacking something, so I added small, appliqued circles in black, white, and gold and was much happier with the overall appearance.

UPDATE - This quilt was displayed in Road to California 2016 and the 2016 Houston International Quilt Festival. It has also been accepted to the 2017 Fall AQS Paducah show.