The Crazy Quilt Handbook

Includes how-to information.

The classic guide to crazy quilting, now with new projects, stitches, and techniques For nearly 30 years, The Crazy Quilt Handbook has been the essential guide to the fine art of crazy quilting. This newly updated edition brings you more of everything that makes crazy quilting wonderful: gorgeous stitches, embellishments, fabulous crazy quilt photos, and updated beautiful projects to make for yourself. Learn all the ways you can use crazy quilting to decorate clothing and accessories, beautify your home, share family memories, and create heirlooms for future generations. This is the must-have resource for any crazy quilter, whether you are just a beginner or are an experienced stitcher looking to enhance your technique. • The best-selling crazy quilting guide from world-renowned expert Judith Baker Montano (over 230,000 copies sold!), now updated with new stitches and techniques • Includes 12 beautiful projects, a dictionary of 37 embroidery and silk ribbon stitches, and instructions for additional embellishments • Benefit from Judith’s wealth of knowledge on colors, fabrics, piecing, embroidery, appliqué, embellishing, beading, photography, painting, dyeing, and more

“[The author] presents her fabulous crazy quilt composed of colorful fabrics cut in hexagons [and] describes how to take each stitch.” —Publishers Weekly Nothing shows off beautiful stitching and embellishments like the blank canvas of a crazy quilt. Jenny Clouston’s gorgeously illustrated primer shows you how to make your own heirloom crazy quilts. Learn: which fabrics, threads, and needles to use how to piece crazy quilt blocks how to embroider with thread, ribbons, beads, and other embellishments how to assemble your blocks into a finished quilt, and more Included are complete instructions for over 100 embroidery, beading, and embellishment stitches; links to full-size patterns for nine hexagonal crazy quilt blocks; and 25 stitch keys showing proper stitch placement and thread and needle selection for 25 different blocks.

With 12 updated step-by-step projects, illustrated stitch guide including silk ribbon stitches.

An exciting new approach for beginning to advanced quilters who want to improvise on their own, with a friend, or with a community of fellow makers. Forget step-by-step instructions and copycat designs. In The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters, Sherri Lynn Wood presents a flexible approach to quilting that breaks free of old paradigms. Instead of traditional instructions, she presents 10 frameworks (or scores) that create a guiding, but not limiting, structure. To help quilters gain confidence, Wood also offers detailed lessons for stitching techniques key to improvisation, design and spontaneity exercises, and lessons on color. Every quilt made from one of Wood’s scores will have common threads, but each one will look different because it reflects the maker’s unique interpretation. Featured throughout the book are Wood’s own quilts and a gallery of contributor works chosen from among the hundreds submitted when she invited volunteers to test her scores during the making of this groundbreaking work. “Wood offers a series of techniques, guidelines and lessons on color choice for those ready to explore improvisational quilting. Her book is loaded with full-color photos and examples to inspire.” —Dallas Morning News “Despite how it may “seam,” quilting isn’t all about rules! Quilting can be an exhilarating way to channel your creativity and express yourself. This book is focused more on exploration than explanation—a perfect mindset for beginners!” —Powell’s Books Staff Pick

Your one-stop source for crazy quilting know-how! From Victorian quilts to contemporary works of art, crazy quilting has evolved into a beautiful mixture of piecing, embroidery, and fabric techniques. Crazy Quilting - The Complete Guide tells you everything you need to know to create your own beautiful heirloom crazy quilts, including: • 10 different methods for piecing. • More than 100 embroidery stitches for ribbons, flosses and threads. • Techniques for dyeing, painting, stamping, printing, and embroidering on silk, cotton, rayon, wool and linen. • Instructions for adding buttons, beads, tassels, cording and other dimensional embellishments. • Tips for finishing your quilts. Whether you are just getting started or have been quilting for years, Crazy Quilting - The Complete Guide is guaranteed to be the crazy quilting resource you turn to the most.

Textile artist and instructor Betty Fikes Pillsbury has won hundreds of awards for her homages to the elegance of Victorian crazy quilting. Grounded in traditional methods but crafted with elements of whimsy, each piece stands on its own as a work of art. In this definitive guide, Pillsbury shares her methods for piecing, embroidering, and embellishing. Her instructions equip readers at any level of quilting skill to use those techniques to express their own visions. Encouraging her readers to see functional and artistic possibilities beyond quilts (wall hangings, purses, and pillowcases are just some of the options), Pillsbury shows them how to make each work by hand, the slow cloth way. An inspiring primer for beginning and experienced quilters alike, this meticulously illustrated how-to book is far more expansive than previous guides. Pillsbury—a master of the form—shows us why crazy quilting belongs firmly in the twenty-first century.

An exquisitely illustrated history of the Crazy quilt from colonial days to ours, with expert instructions for planning, piecing, and embroidering or embellishing your own “Crazy.”