Play Quilts

Improve your quilt designs by learning how to organize fabric by size and color, while making adorably sophisticated quilts (both pieced and appliquéd) for babies and children. Each of the 20 bright, happy quilts is shown in warm and cool colorways to spark the imagination and use up your stash. Stacey Day’s friendly voice and great advice make it easy to choose beautiful palettes and add design flair, while also guiding you through the best methods for organizing fabrics by color and size, from tiny scraps to bulky yardage.

Play quilts, creative activity quilts for kids.

Scraps never looked so good! This is improvisational piecing reinvented—learn how to create a unique piece of “made-fabric” in just 15 minutes with Victoria Findlay Wolfe’s improvisational scrap-piecing methods, then incorporate your made-fabric into traditional quilt blocks. As you play, you’ll sharpen your design skills and learn about combining colors and prints in new ways…then watch your quilt design emerge. Discover just how distinctive classic blocks like Sawtooth Star or Flying Geese can be, when they’re constructed with more spunk and spontaneity! Includes 11 challenge exercises to strengthen your creative muscles, plus an inspirational quilt gallery.

12 original quilt patterns are presented in multiple sets, with innumerable additional sets suggested. Quilters can follow a complete and accurate pattern while creating something uniquely their own.

Pixelate your patchwork by piecing together fabric strips in a new way. Pixelated imagery is part of our pop culture—Emily Cier helps you bring it to your family with her cheerful quilt designs using your favorite solids. Use this unique style of strip piecing to make pictures of friendly fish, dastardly pirates, and beautiful butterflies much more fun! Kids of all ages (grown-ups too) will love these quilts for the crib, the bed, or just for snuggling. Sew designs a fish bowl, a treasure map, and even an aerial view of the town center. Includes cutting guides and Kona color charts.

Doreen Speckmann shares her amusing and adventurous techniques for creating millions of individualized quilt designs by playing with a small number of component parts. She takes readers through the steps she follows to develop her unique quilt patterns, shows us how to explore painlessly on our own, and shares her secrets of color selection and piecing tricks. Dorren also gives detailed instructions for four of her personal favorites.

Learn the easy secrets to creating dynamic free-pieced letters for your quilts - with no tracing and no measuring. Want your next quilt to send a special message? Now you can spell it out with no tracing, no templates, no paper-piecing, no applique, and no precise measuring! "Word Play Quilts" teaches readers a terrific technique for free-pieced letters, as well as three practice projects and loads of quilt samples to instruct and inspire. This is your chance to break rules, mismatch, go wonky, and enjoy yourself.

At Play in the Garden of Stitch provides ways to think about how thread and fabric can bring depth to composition, texture to emotions and line to ideas. Kovarik has won numerous awards for her densely machine-stitched art in which the quilting line is used to draw intricate patterns and pictures. Simple exercises encourage the reader to approach each day with a curious mind willing to make a mess of expectations, embrace the wonky by letting the thread lead, and think in thread while making careful observations of the world. Heavily illustrated with examples and finished art the book provides quilters and artists with new ways to approach this medium.