Member's Gallery
Susan Briscoe
"Hakone Yosegi Sampler", from my "Japanese Quilt Blocks to Mix and Match" book.
Yosegi means "parquetry" and these designs are made in Hakone, near Tokyo, to cover smalle items, including the famous puzzle boxes. In real life, some individual block motifs would be smaller than 3/4in square!
This quilt is called "Butterfly Dance" and was my entry for the Kona Bay Challenge. The theme this year was "The Emperor's New Clothes", a rather difficult theme to illustrate in a Japanese context without being hugely disrespectful to the Emperor. I decided to tell a little story about newly batched butterflies joining in with the dance - perhaps there could be an Emperor butterfly in among them, in his "new clothes"? (there isn't, because I couldn't find any quilt fabrics with Emperors on them