Japanese Mini Quilts

I've been reading (quite sympathetically) over the past few months about the mutant stomach bugs that have been making their way through so many of your homes.  Well, it seems that we here in the Quilt Dad household are not immune.  My son brought one home from school last Friday and it's been making its way around all week ... leaving a wake of cancelled birthday parties and missed deadlines in its path.  Mrs. Quilt Dad and I have been tag-teaming childcare duties, and I'm home with my son (who hasn't been able to kick it yet) today.

Grrrrr ....

Anyhow, I thought it would be good time to post about one of my recent mini quilt swaps.  In March, the Swap 'Til You Drop group traded mini quilts with a Japanese theme.  Here is the awesome loot I received from Andrea (aka quiltedoma).

Besides an amazing quilt (which I'll get to in a minute), Andrea sent some beautiful Kaffe Fassett fabrics, stuff from the United Nations (where she works!!), and a bunch of great stuff for my kids (including some U.N. teddy bears that aren't in the picture because they were already snatched up and in their beds!)

And now, the quilt:

How cool is this?  It's a double-sided quilt!  On one side is a coin-like design with beautiful Asian fabrics.  And on the other side is a really creative design featuring an origami crane.

I'm always looking for creative label ideas, and Andrea's is truly original.  Because the quilt is double-sided, she created a dangling tag featuring all of the quilt info!  Now it can hang on either side.  I love this quilt so much -- thanks again, Andrea!

When I found out it was a Japanese-themed swap, I of course turned to my trusty Japanese Block book.  I decided to create a small Japanese block sampler, and pulled a palette of brown, pink and cream fabrics from Amy Butler's Midwest Modern line.

Here's my pieced back:

This pictures gives a little bit of a better view of the four blocks.  I really enjoyed making this quilt, but in retrospect wonder if I should have stuck with solids or smaller prints.  I think some of the design gets lost because of the large prints on some of the fabrics I used.

As always, I had a great swap experience.  For those of you who have been asking me in the comments about how to get involved in swaps, I encourage you to come over to Flickr and jump in to the many active swaps happening over there!