Japanese Quilt Inspirations - quilts for sale update

The gorgeous 'Kimono' quilt from the front cover of 'Japanese Quilt Inspirations' was sold on Saturday. I've updated this earlier post which lists the quilts for sale from that book.


The fabrics and the quilting on this one were lovely. I used Kona Bay's Flowers of the Seasons for the twelve little kimono and all the other fabrics were gold prints. When Karen Florey freehand quilted it, she used shaded threads. Although we had discussed the quilting beforehand, when the quilt came back, the quilting in the border and the feathers along the sashing were so neatly done, I asked Karen if she'd programmed the machine - No! The designs were marked up and then the quilting was done freehand. Click the photo below to see just how beautiful the quilting looks up close.


My plan for putting these quilts up for sale is (ultimately) finance my own longarm machine. In the meantime, I have enough of the fabrics used for most of the quilts to be able to recreate them almost exactly as they appeared in the book, perhaps with a few fabric substitutions, but at first glance they will look like the originals. I have enough of the kimono fabric, the kimono block backgrounds, the block borders and (possibly) the sashing to recreate this, and I just need to find a similar fabric for the border. As I kept the selvedges from these quilt fabrics, I may even be able to track down the same one. I might machine quilt the remake, but I doubt my quilting will be anywhere near the standard of Karen's! It will add another dimension to my talk, 'My Japanese Quilt Inspirations', to see if the audience can spot that it isn't the original quilt, and give me some fun quilting it with different designs too.

BTW, if anyone knows the name of that turquoise wave pattern border fabric, please let me know! I can't find the selvedge scrap to identify it. It might be Kona Bay, but I'm not sure - I think it's by one of the big 'Oriental' fabric specialists, so it might be Hoffman or Robert Kaufman (although it doesn't look like one of theirs).

EDIT - As it is very unlikely I'd be able to find that border fabric now, I got this instead from eBay -

It looks like it has a bit more gold than the original, but the design also looks like something that suggests an easy quilting design, following the waves!