I've had the privilege of learning from many gifted teachers, one of whom is Hari Walner. This is her latest book from C&T Publishing, $26.95. I've been waiting for it for years. She has given us new designs, reworked designs from her successful line of pattern packs and great color photos of each motif quilted in various threads with diverse background quilting so you can see just what it will look like and not have to imagine. Some people can visualize really easily and others can't, so this is a real help.
The chapter Design Your Quilt for Quilting is my favorite. Like Harriet Hargrave suggests, Hari tells us to think about the quilting from the beginning, before starting to make a top, so that finding appropriate quilting designs won't be a chore.
Among her suggestions is eliminating seams when possible, and I could not agree more. So often, I've quilted a beautiful motif that is perfect for the theme and space only to find that a seam or an intersection of seams literally sticks out in the center of the motif. That's not good design. Super-easy speed piecing methods add seams so beginners don't have to fool with set-in squares and triangles or deal with bias edges, but they create problems for me when I'm quilting. Hari shows how to redraft the block and how much more successful the quilt is in the end. This makes a big difference in show quilts.
Another suggestion is to vary the way borders are applied so those seams don't interfere with a border design. Quilting being a visual thing, you need to see that page to really understand the concept.
If you are trying your hand at machine quilting, this book is a must-have. If you're not interested in machine quilting, it's still worth acquiring because your quilts need to be quilted (or they're not quilts) and the book includes gorgeous designs anyone would want on their quilts.
Other titles from Hari:
Trapunto by Machine
Exploring Machine Trapunto
Paper pattern packs of continuous line machine quilting patterns published by Beautiful Publications
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