Years ago, Christa Quilts offered free giveaways for orders of a certain amount. I don't need much encouragement to feed my stash, so over the course of several orders I selected half-yards of lovely Oriental prints. Eventually I decided what to do with them.

I have a book by the long-gone That Patchwork Place called Loose Change. It has patterns for 5" squares, among other sizes of pre-cuts. This particular pattern, called "Japanese Yen", is on the cover of the book, and is in fact why I bought it. So after some delay in deciding what background fabric to use, I finally got it put together.

This block is a lot easier to make than it looks like, it's commonly called "Arkansas Crossroads". Jenny Doan from Missouri Star did a tutorial on this several years ago. The pattern in the book uses squares of scrappy blacks for the background, but I didn't like the way it was turning out, so I went with a single black print background fabric. I'm very pleased with the results.

I wanted it to be a little bit bigger, so I added another border of the background fabric.

The Quilting

to be continued...