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)!