Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
Patchwork quilting has never been easier! Complete instructions, illustrations, and four permanent plastic templates help needlecrafters create such favorites as Ohio Star, Dutchman's Puzzle, Windmill, and many more — using the sewing machine or traditional handsewing techniques. 27 patterns.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
A patchwork quilt pattern book
Customer Rating:
I ordered this quite recently and to be honest found it pretty disappointing.
It was of course written in the mid 1980s so do not expect any of the modern techniques of rotary cutting and paper piecing. The instructions would be barely enough to get a beginner going as they are written in text with no how to illustrations, but they are of the most basic and quite old fashioned, requiring you to use templates to cut out each piece individually with scissors. Only the briefest detail is given on how to machine piece and how to hand piece using a running stitch and the final instructions for binding the quilts with four separate pieces of fabric, one for each side, added on consecutively, were never good practice at any time in the history of quiltmaking. The variety of patterns is quite good but unfortunately there are some eight pointed star blocks including Lemoyne Star which have been drawn incorrectly as four patch blocks.
There are no pictures of finished quilts, even hand drawn. This book was written in the days before everybody had computers and although the illustrations of the blocks are good and clear what you get is instructions for 27 quilts all exactly the same size, with the same size border and the same block layout and no consideration given for the different kinds of patterns included in the book.
Compared with the quality of today's quilt books I think Dover should consider withdrawing this one as it doesn't hold a candle to most of the quilt pattern books available today or indeed others they published around the same time as this one.
I would recommend that any beginner considering a new book avoid this one and consider perhaps Lynne Edwards's Sampler Quilt series and perhaps one of the Jinny Beyer books, which will give plenty of information and lots of patterns, and which are well illustrated and beautifully produced with clear illustrations of work in progress, patterns and finished quilt galleries.
Traditional Patterns
Customer Rating:
The patterns (as the title of the book indicates) are the traditional ones(Ohio Star, Eight Point Star, Clay's Choice) that more experienced quilters will already be famliar with, but it does have those nifty plastic templates (four of them--you'd be surprised how much you can do with so little)which in my opinion are worth the money all by themselves. If you're a real beginner and the patterns are new to you, I would recommend you combine this with Laura Erlich's Complete Idiot's Guide, which I just LOVE. She gives really clear simple instructions on how to piece together the same designs in this book, which this is a little weak on, if you don't already know what you're doing.
Easy to Make -- Yes they are!
Customer Rating:
The pictures and descriptions are easy to follow. The templates are heavy plastic to stand up to the many hours of cutting I will put them through! The patterns included in this book will keep quilters of all levels busy. Make one block or an entire quilt - the directions for both are included.
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