One of the characters in the book takes a trip to Hawaii to help a friend start a Hawaiian quilt camp. She decides she wants to learn to make a Hawaiian quilt as a momento of her stay in Maui. After reading in the book about the quilts and their meanings, and how they are made, I started thinking about trying one of my own. I've done applique before but not with very successful results and it wasn't that enjoyable. I've never been able to figure out which technique I wanted to try to make it easier to do. All those little pieces to be placed and appliqued and so on. So, I did a little research and found a web site that has a few free patterns and some basic instructions for how to make a Hawaiian applique quilt. The web site is here. You can choose one of the free patterns that are on this page, then if you click on "Quilting Instructions" it will tell you exactly how to cut out your block, quilt it, etc. This is the best web site I've found with all this information in one place. Then, for eye candy, I started doing image searches in Google for Hawaiian quilts and found these:
This was enough to get me started, so I printed off one of the free patterns from the web site and decided to start small with a pillow size block to get hang of this applique thing. It wasn't too bad and I know that with practice I will get better. When I finish this pillow I want to make another one, but a little larger, maybe a small wall hanging size.
Here is my block. I finished appliquing it last night. I haven't quilted it yet, but that's the next step. I'll post progress pictures later on.
