Creating a Hawaiian-style quilt has always meant respecting traditional kapu, or taboos: Never put a figure of a person in the design (because Hawaiians believed the human form could get up and walk at night) nor an animal (also too restless). Don’t work at night. Don’t quilt on black fabric.

Because of these and other strict kapu about form and style, the elegant look of Hawaiian quilts hasn’t changed much since Hawaiians learned quilting from American missionaries in the early 19th century and quickly made the craft their own.

Until now. A wild new style of Hawaiian quilting has emerged recently that breaks most of the rules. Like their traditional counterparts, contemporary Hawaiian quilts often have a Hawaii or island theme and involve applique, but other than that, anything goes. Instead of a symmetrical, usually floral pattern, you might now find the Volcano goddess Pele, an underwater scene, or anything at all. Instead of just two solid colors, there’s usually a multitude of bright colors and even printed or hand-dyed fabrics. Exquisite traditional-style Hawaiian quilts are still being made, but contemporary Hawaiian quilts have diverged into a completely different – and no less valued – art form.

University of Hawaii textiles professor Linda Arthur’s new book on the subject, At the Cutting Edge: Contemporary Hawaiian Quilts As Art, was published last month by Island Heritage. “What got me interested in contemporary Hawaiian quilts is that they’re so different,” she says. “How do I explain the consistency in Hawaiian quilts for 150 years, and then, all of the sudden, the rules disappeared and everything went haywire? That was my enigma.” Arthur, herself a long-time quilter, says quilting was important at another point in her career, too, when, three years into a 10-year research project involving Amish and Mennonites, some women finally invited her to sit and quilt with them and she knew she was accepted.

Arthur’s recent research suggests that several factors led to the dramatic changes in Hawaiian quilts, including the fact that quilting was out of vogue during the 1950s through 70s. Hawaiian quilting became popular again during a Hawaiian cultural renaissance in the late 1970s, and attracted some who had moved to the islands since statehood. But she says because newcomers didn’t have grandmothers to teach them and didn’t feel culturally bound by kapu, beginning quilters learned in classes, where they experimented with techniques, materials and styles and ended up creating a whole new art of Hawaiian quilting.

What has remained consistent, Arthur says, is that Hawaiian quilts are still about aloha. “They’re created with love – it’s about the giving of love from one person to another – and that has not changed as the designs and ideas have changed.”