Review By: Barbara Delaney,   Quilting Arts Magazine - December 1, 2005
"This is the book that every novice quilter should have to gain confidence and skills for creating art quilts. These authors have faith that with the appropriate information, training, and practice, most anyone who reads their book can succeed at quiltmaking. Katie Pasquini Masopust, an award-winning art quilter, and Brett Barker, a painter and teacher of fine arts, begin each chapter with a creative exercise to get you going, and you'll find ideas and helpful hints scattered throughout. This book will prove you do not have to be an artist first to create artistic quilts. Get inspired, get this book, and start creating!"

Review   Journal of the Int'l Quilt Association - January 1, 2006
This book brings to the forefront just how important it is for a person to realize that creativity and artistic talent doesn't necessarily have to be inherent, but it can be learned.

Review   QNM - March 1, 2006
Katie and Brett boil down the necessary basics of design and color--line and shape, focal point, and proportion--into a series of exercises that develop right-brain creativity. With these lessons, you may find the confidence and lay the groundwork to be the art quilter you've always wanted to be.

Review   American Quilt Retailer - May 1, 2006
Techniques, creative inspiration, and confidence for the experienced and new art quilter. Don't have this market with your customers? Find a teacher to work with this book and you soon will.

Review   American Patchwork & Quilting - October 1, 2006
Step-by-step exercises for more than 20 techniques make this book a good place to start for anyone wishing to create an art quilt.

Review   Quilt Journal - September 1, 2006
Reviewed in this foreign language publication.

Review   Patchwork & Quilting - June 1, 2006
"Books that point the way to ideas that increase creativity are always welcome. We are advised that in order to do this we must practice and so are provided with exercises to access and increase the qualities that will make us (hopefully) into quilt artists. Studio set-up, materials, colour and composition are all covered and these lead the way towards developing your own unique style. In each chapter there are student exercises and quilts by professionals that demonstrate how they get the best out of these factors. The authors recommend that you work through the book, doing the set tasks in each chapter and they really do look fun to do. Drawing, paper collage, stitching, composing with line and shape and more will all build confidence and skill. With all this information, both technical and visual, the book's claim that it will be 'The art school you never went to' seems well founded."

Review By: Judie Bellingham,   BellaOnline - June 11, 2008
“If you are a quilter like me, you've been quilting for quite some time, probably over 20 years or so, and I'm guessing you're looking for “something more” in your quilting. You've probably (again, like me), tried various different genres in quilting. I've dallied with Celtic and bias bars, Needleturn applique, chenille, paper piecing, foundation piecing, stained glass, and designing your own quilt.

It's in this last category, designing your own quilt, that I've been most frustrated and perturbed. I know there's an artist in me, I know I have creativity brimming at about ear level and I know that this is a direction I'd like to take.

I also know that the biggest impediment for me has been - not knowing how to start. Not knowing the fundamentals of design has thwarted every attempt I've made to crack the code on making art quilts.

That was…Until I found this fabulous reference book titled Color and Composition for the Creative Quilter - Improve and quilt with easy-to-follow lessons. This magical book is written by Katie Pasquini Mosopust and Brett Barker and has to be one of the very best books available today that explains in simple easy to follow lessons all about the fundamentals of design including Composition, Line and Shape, Materials and methods, Contour cutting and stitching and value and color. All the tools you need to feel confident in starting your Art Quilt journey. There's even a section that “critics” artists quilts, comments usually made by their creators about what they did and how they could have improved. Now that's confidence building when even the artists get it wrong sometimes!!

Exercises that are clearly set out for maximum skill attainment - it's a wonderful way to learn.

This is a reference book for me and is very rarely not open with me pouring over it, gleaning more and more skills base and understanding.

There's also a lot of attention paid to color schemes and the ways to use a color wheel to build up your quilt. This book is over flowing with colored photographs, graphics and illustrations that simply whet your appetite, and cause you to forget the time, the day, the year even.

I would thoroughly recommend this book to any aspiring Art Quilter, either a new quilters or old timer like me. You never, ever stop learning, and let's face it, nor do you want to. Keep that right brain churning, churning."


Review   Quilts and Creativity - November 2, 2008
"I have Katie’s previous book, Color and Composition for the Creative Quilter: Improve Any Quilt with Easy-to-Follow Lessons and enjoyed the quilts and the lessons in the book.  Even though I didn’t want to make her quilts, I did learn from the exercises.  That’s what I believe the best quilting books do:  teach you how to improve the quilts you want to make, not how to make someone else’s quilt.   While the Fall Quilt Market 2008 Schoolhouse session I attended was short, Katie showed impressive innovation, humor and accessibility.  She doesn’t get so serious about her art quilts that she forgets to have fun with them and her students."