Customer Reviews

From a Quilter's Garden: A Fresh Crop of Applique Designs

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If gardening is your passion and applique your medium, this book is wondful. Designs may be realistic or whimsical, depending on the fabrics used.

I really enjoyed reading this book and making projects based on it. It has wonderful unique designs based on vegetable and flowers from your garden. It also has great ideas on layouts and designs. I used hand-dyed fabrics for my fruits, vegetable and flowers and they looked so realistic. One of the projects made a very memorable gift to a garden-loving friend!

The book is organized in the following way:
1. Fabric Selection. This chapter talks about fabric selection for background and features. It also talks about setting the fabric which I found interesting.
2. Building your quilt. A section on scale and design walls.
3. Gadgets and Necessities. This chapter talks about tools you will need for your project.
4. Technical Considerations. This section talks about weaves, fabric material, washing fabrics before the project.
5. Final preparations. This chapter covers a master plan, preparing background of your quilt, and window templates.
6. Needle Turn Appliqué. This chapter describes the authors favorite's technique for appliqué.
7. Special Techniques. Goes over reverse appliqué, technique for tiny round berries, using pens and paints and so forth.
8. Feature Blocks. This section goes into details about 8 fruit blocks, 8 vegetable blocks, 8 herb blocks. It finishes up talking about medallions and borders, which are large blocks that combine a number of garden elements. There 4 projects that demonstrate them.
9. Gallery. The gallery contains photographs a large number of beautiful completed quilts.
10. Quilt sets. The section discusses how to combine individual blocks in unique layout for form sets.
11. Block patterns. Detailed patterns for the projects in the book. To use them you need to enlarge them to a size needed by you on a copy machine.
12. Finishing techniques. A chapter on borders, quilting, binding.

It is a great book! I enjoyed creating projects based on it.

Another wonderful book by Ms Swaim. She does a great job in teaching and shows you step-by-step how to create her patterns. I really enjoy her books and DVD's.