Lucky Spool's Essential Guide to Modern Quilt Making: From Color to Quilting: 10 Design Workshops by Your Favorite Teachers
The first lesson in this book is on color — dissecting colors, explaining hues / values / etc. It was something I must admit, I skimmed. The best advice here was to consult color wheels and a reminder that there are no rules (though you do want to stay within tasteful ranges, hopefully).
The second lesson follows up on the first lesson by explaining what solids can offer. This course seeks to remind you that solids can enhance prints or can be used to create patterns.
Lesson three takes a different approach, focussing on prints.
Lesson four teaches us about improvisational patchwork. Probably my favorite chapter. It encourages sort of an organized chaos kind of quilting. Good for people like me who only barely sew and who find advanced techniques either intimidating or too time consuming and frustrating. This chapter/lesson really screamed “I am for everyone”.
Next up was The Alternative Grid. There was a lot of negative space here as well as traditional quilting spaces tweaked just slightly to look more modern.
Circles and curves was up next. A chapter where the title along frighted me. This lesson did little to make me feel more comfortable about working with things like circles but for those who love torturing themselves with such things, there are a few nice ideas here, though nothing here is a super memorable standout.
Paper Piecing - this is probably the best eye candy chapter. Instructions here will show you how to do things like make a dress and stiletto heel out of fabric.
Large Scale piecing - This focussed on blocks that were larger than 12”.
Modern Machine Quilting - here they focus on the ability to do some fancy stitching — some of which is more complicated than others. While I am in total awe of some of the stitching patterns here, I don’t think I feel any more confident about actually trying them just from reading this.
A study of Modern Quilts - pictures and blurbs of 50 quilts. Could be inspiring or just filler…
Overall I am unsure of who this book is for. For advanced quilters this would be quite the unnecessary book. For beginners it seems either too boring or too advanced. Perhaps for the intermediate quilter or those who like eye candy and the occasional tip and trick (those do exist here but I am not sure there’s enough unique ideas here).
A decent book but not a must add to most collections,
* Disclaimer: I received this book at no cost in order to review it. I offered no guarantee of a positive review, though I only request books I think I'll like because why read a book you think you’ll hate?
