Fanciful Stitches Colorful Quilts book review

Embroidery provides a beautiful way to embellish plain ordinary fabric into works of art. You can take a piece of white fabric, and create beautiful pictures or designs. These can be turned into wall hangings or pillows, and provide a great way to decorate your home.

Since embroidery can be done with needle and thread, it can be an inexpensive way to craft, as long as you don't get carried away with buying every color of thread available. It doesn't require a machine, so it is accessible to people at relatively younger ages. It is also a portable project, so you can take it and work on it while you are waiting at the dentist's office or at soccer games.

In the last ten years or so, people have been combining quilting and embroidery in greater numbers. There are several ways of combining quilting and embroidery.

In the 1920's quilters embroidered blocks and used them as a quilt block. They embroidered a motif using red thread, called rework. The block would then be sashed and put into a quilt.

Then, people started adding fabric to an embroidered block. They would use the embroidered piece as a part of the quilt block instead of letting it stand on its own. Sometimes this was in the form of a crazy quilt.

More recently, Australians such as Leanne Beaseley have designed quilts that combine different size blocks of fabric and embroidery to make the quilt.

Now, Laura Wasilowski has created a quilt that applies embroidery directly on the appliquéd fabric to embellish the quilt

In Fanciful Stitches, Colorful Quilts: 11 Easy Appliqué Projects to Embroider by Hand, Laura Wasilowski shows you how to unleash your creativity using easy fusing to create the shapes, and then embroider the designs on the quilts.

You simply cut out colorful shapes and fuse them onto a background. Then add embroidery hand stitches to add color, texture, pattern, definition, and excitement.

All of the projects in this book are small, and can be made by older children as well as adults. They would make group projects as well. The small size and easy forgivingly nature of these quilts make them a great beginner project, but experts will also enjoy making them.

This is a pretty book with lots of colorful pictures that get you excited about making these beautiful projects. The first section provides directions on how to make the projects, which normally looks pretty boring in most quilting books, but these pretty pictures and new techniques makes it a fun read. There is a section that shows you some different kinds of stitches you can add to the quilt. There are sixteen stitches, which are plenty, although once you get experience, you may look for more stitches.

Then there are the projects. There are some short directions on how to make the projects, but since they are all made pretty much the same way, the directions, along with the instructions in the front of the book, should suffice.

After the project section, she teaches you how to do a wrapped binding, which is a quick and easy finish for small stitched quilts.

The last section has the patterns for all the appliqué shapes the quilts.

Laura's fun personality and easy-going style is evident in the book, as it is in the trailer. She pays attention to detail, but inspires creativity. You can see more of her work on Laura's website, Artfabrik. The publisher C&T Publishing, also provides some views of some of the pages.

This book is brimming with color and ideas about how to make these quilts. It inspires creativity and shows a great way to embellish quilts.

These small quilts are great for people who do not have the time or expertise to make the bigger quilts or pieced quilts. Simply fuse the fabrics on the quilt and embellish them as little or as much as you want. They are really easy and fun to make, and this book will show you the way.