Treasure Hunt: 13 Quilts Inspired by Antique Finds

In the first couple of chapters, Linda Collins and Leah Zieber give you advice about how to buy and take care of antique quilts.

The rest of the book showcase beautiful quilts and provide modern ways to recreate these vintage beauties.  There are lots of wonderful photographs of the quilts and step by step directions for making them. I found myself wanting to make almost all of them.

The book comes out January 6. I was honored to receive a review copy from Edelweiss.

Graphic Quilts From Everday Images

Graphic Quilts From Everyday Images is by Heather Schrimsher. The subtitle is 15 Patterns Inspired by Urban Life, Architecture, and Beyond. I'm sorry the photos have a yellow cast to them. I took them when the sun was out and used a cool light bulb so I'm not sure what happened, and this is the best the photo editing software could do. This photo is cool grays and blues and the photo doesn't do it justice.

It is published by Martingale using That Patchwork Place imprint. This one is my favorite quilt in the book. The orange leaves float on a deep plum background.

The book is divided into three sections. Enlarged Detail recommends focusing on enlarging a certain detail of photographs the author has taken.

The next section, Blocks and Repeats, plays with the details taken out of a photo.

The last section, Lines and Strips, focuses on the main elements of a photo or subject. This requires simplification to distill the most important part of the subject.
 

Full size templates are provided right with the pattern, and everything is kept together so you don't have to flip through the back to find them.

There a variety of patterns with a variety of complexity.  This one uses simple rectangles to create a great design.

There are also curved piecing. I like this one because it is so graphic and interesting with just a few curved seams. And they are big, so they shouldn't be too difficult to sew.

As I copied the Amazon link to the title at the top of the page, I see it is on sale for $14.99, and used copies are available for as little as $3.00.

Lunch-Hour Patchwork

Lunch-Hour Patchwork is published by Martingdale. The people at the publisher spend Wednesday lunches making a project, like these projects that are pretty quick to make.  The subtitle is 15 Easy-to-start (and finish!) projects. They don't promise that the projects will be finished in an hour, but they will fill an hour with fun and relaxation.
 

My favorite quilt in this book is this tiny trees project.  Since I haven't sewn my equilateral triangles together, I was somewhat surprised that they didn't sew this quilt in rows of equilateral triangles, alternated with stumps.  Instead each of the trees are made as a block, like the Christmas trees quilt I made. This is actually a quilt I am thinking about making.

Here's a page of some of the projects in this book. Most of the projects don't need templates but the few that do are printed, actual size, right on the pages themselves.

Since that page doesn't show everything, I decided to show you the table of contents too.

The Forgotten Seamstress

This is a book I reviewed on the Goodreads.

 The Forgotten Seamstress by Liz Trenow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed reading this book about a woman who was gifted an intriguing crazy quilt which led her to a search about the maker of the quilt. The book goes back and forth between two stories - a sociology student is interviewing a woman from an insane asylum who tells a far-fetched story about having a love-child with a member of the royal family, and the woman researching the quilt. The quilt goes through a little adventure of its own.

View all my reviews

Wabi-Sabi Sewing

A couple of books I have in my library stack need to be returned because someone has requested them. Wabi-Sabi Sewing by Karen Lewis is one of them. The subtitle is 20 sewing patterns for perfectly imperfect projects. It is published by sewandso company in the U.K.

They all look pretty perfect to me. I really like the soft aesthetic of this cover quilt on the bed. I also liked the hand sewing on the jeans in the background. Just some running stitches to decorate the jeans.

I liked this applique quilt too. It uses the Hawaiian style applique, but adds extra colors and shapes.  I like the blue color too.

The yellow and grays in this quilt made me think of Sunlight in Winter blog. The colors look more orange on my computer screen, but they are yellow in the original.

I really like this page that shows all of the projects in the book.

Books like these make me feel calm and relaxed just looking at them.