The Quilt Library

[crockpotcauldron]

I have another thirty five or so quilt books from the dime cart, and a problem on my hands. Quilt books tend to be very thin - ranging from magazine width and staple-bound to a centimeter wide and floppy, with the odd hardcover outlier. I have well over a hundred of them now, and I can't find a damn thing I'm looking for. I have had to institute several more sections.

History: analysis of historical quilts or regional trends such as Baltimore Albums or those goofy centennial eagle appliqués I love

Pretty to Look At: I will never in a million years make these masterpieces but they're nice to look at, just like it's nice to look at pictures of fancy baked goods I won't be making.

Quilting: technically all quilts are quilted, but these books focus on the actual technique of quilting (which is stitching the layers of front, back, and fluff together) not just the patchwork or appliqué of assembling the quilt top. It's fascinating how much of an effect quilting has on the final look!

Patchwork: putting multiple pieces of fabric together to make a patterned quilt top. Also known as piecing. The more common variety of quilt, especially in the US. (The others are wholecloth and appliqué.)

Appliqué: putting little pieces of cloth on top of a bigger piece of cloth to make a patterned quilt top.

Traditional: these are the old pieced or appliqué quilt blocks with the individual names - log cabin, drunkard's path, hither and yon, Rose of Sharon, Irish chain, bear's paw, that sort of thing. I love those things. It feels like a secret code, and I'm always thrilled to uncover a new name.

Stained Glass: a style of quiltmaking where the final effect looks like a stained glass window. Very cool if you can pull it off. You can do it with appliqué or patchwork, depending on how angular you want it to look. I have not yet made one, but I live in hope.

Scrappy: quilts designed to take advantage of a lot of small amounts of different fabrics, instead of the more usual designs that require large cuts of just a few different fabrics. The trick is, you do actually need a large variety of fabrics to make these look good.

Paper Piecing: a variety of patchwork in which the fabric is sewn directly to a pattern printed on paper (well, the American version, anyway. English is different.) Not as complicated as it looks, and very good at making novelty designs.

Dolls & Toys: I have a few excellent rag doll books I paid good money for, and a few miscellaneous stuffed animal and doll books I got off the dime cart.

Misc.: home decor, woodworking, cross stitch, garment sewing, and other crafty enterprises.

Anyway, with more sections and a lot of post-its, I have a decent shot at remembering what's where. I have made a small pile of the dime cart quilt books I don't want to keep, and I'm going to give them away at the guild meeting tomorrow.

Comments

[chickadee_sun]

You are going to end up with every quilt book in town, aren't you.

You listed three types of quilting and then defined two of them, patchwork and applique, but not wholecloth.

Does stained glass style require jewel tones for the stained glass look or is it color-neutral? It sounds really pretty.

Would something like your Smaug quilt be considered a scrappy quilt, or is it a specific style?

[crockpotcauldron]

Oh, whoops! Wholecloth is when you use a large piece of plain cloth (often white) and don't add any other bits to it, because you want to show off your fancy quilting. Google "satin bedspread" if you wanna see some. You can use candlewicking or trapunto to add a bit of texture if you like, but it's mostly about exhaustive quilting. I don't actually have a wholecloth book, but if I want to try it out I can just use any of the books from the quilting section of my library.

I do indeed have a decent shot at winding up with every quilting book in town, though I have been sharing the books I don't want. And of course, there are still more good books on my list that haven't had the decency to float past on the dime cart.

Stained glass quilts can technically use any colors, but I prefer the ones that have that bright suncatcher look to them, you know? If your colors are too dark or strongly patterned, the black outlines don't stand out enough to give you the right effect, but that's pretty much the only limit.

Smaug is a scrappy quilt. I have seen versions of him on fandominstitches that are much more matching. I used a lot of different yellows and oranges while paper piecing, and spliced them to make the half square triangles too. The black and the blue were offcuts from friends. Some people get testy about the definition of scrap - I've seen sticklers say a true scrap piece "must be less than a quarter yard of fabric left over from another project" or that a scrappy quilt "must be at least 80% scrap by volume" to qualify - and in that case, Smaug still might qualify, since the red stripe and black/yellow fabrics are fat quarters and everything else is scavenged, including the backing. But yeah, to everyone but the strictest of sticklers, he's totally scrappy.

Scrap quilts are about using up small amounts of fabrics, and a lot of scrap quilt books use standardized shapes like 5, 3.5, and 2 inch squares as the basis of their patterns just to make large volumes of scraps easier to handle, or to take advantage of precut packages like jelly rolls or charm squares, but at its core, scrap quilting is the quilting equivalent of stuffing everything in your fridge into an omelet. Paper piecing is actually extremely good at using up tiny mismatched scraps, which is one of the reasons I love it!

[chickadee_sun]

Wow, wholecloth looks absolutely nothing like my mental image of a quilt! When there are no pieces to hold on/together, do the quilting stiches serve a purpose or are they just a subtle decoration? Holding the stuffing in place so it doesn't bunch up or something?

[crockpotcauldron]

Yup, you got it right! Quilting is both decorative and structural.

On a structural level, quilting stitches go all the way through the layers from the front, through the batting (the fluffy stuff, basically a sheet of stuffing), and through the backing, and it holds everything in place and keeps the batting tacked down in sections so it doesn't shift and lump. Lumping is much less of a concern these days, since batting has improved, but batting packages will still tell you the intervals at which you must quilt to keep problems from happening in there.

Quilting is also a decorative element - you can see it well on those shiny satin bedspreads: they're making texture. Unlike embroidery, which would only be on the top layer, quilting pulls the layers tightly together, creating dips and outlining shapes. Unquilted parts fluff up more in contrast - you can see that happening with Smaug too.