Sensible advice
This is a slim book (about half the pages are graph paper for sketching and planning) but despite its short length, it is a great book to assist in tackling free-motion stitching if you are not confident. I always enjoy Angela Walters’s books because they take you through patterns and methods of stitching that offer sensible advice about how to improve your stitching skill set. This book is great for that. It looks at how sketching your pattern before machine stitching can help you map out what an entire quilt can look like (without leaving it to chance) and improve the quality of that stitching. She explores different ways of looking at a quilt in order to create different design areas and layouts so that you can choose which will suit your sewing style and the required pattern. Looking at blocks as a way of repeating pattern, using contrast to highlight portions of a quilt and breaking down a quilt pattern into its component pieces are all explored, and helpfully followed with pages for sketching to see how you have responded to each section. Patterns for borders (with suggestions of the best suited stitching for this area), using negative space to add movement or extend and connect the piecing in a quilt are explored, as are the extension of basic quilting designs into something new and exciting. All this culminates in examples of 27 free-motion quilting designs and then you are left to your own devices to take this advice and put it into practice on the book’s worksheets. Although this is a short book, it is a hands-on approach to developing stitching ideas and planning out your approach to free-motion stitching more thoroughly. In this area, Angela Walters shows great expertise.
