Category: Reviews

Book Review – Color Essentials by Amanda Murphy

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I’m so excited I get to share my review of a fantastic book with you today. It’s called Color Essentials by Amanda Murphy (author of Modern Holiday and recently featured on Quilty’s meet a modern quilter.)

Color Essentials

Color Essentials by Amanda Murphy

This is a book after my own heart. It features 12 crisp and vibrant quilts (3 smaller projects and 9 full-size quilts) made from precut solids. Need I say more? Don’t worry – I will!

Color Essentials starts off with a fantastic presentation on color theory using Amanda’s cleverly designed “Kona Color Wheel”. All of the quilts in this book were made entirely from Kona Solid precuts in three gorgeous coloways – Sunrise, Sunset and Bright. In fact, Amanda partnered with Robert Kaufman to create the first two palettes to go along with the book. How fantastic!

Kona Sunrise

Kona Sunrise

Kona Sunset

Kona Sunset

Amanda divides the colors up into warm and cool hues and uses actual Kona Solid fabric swatches to illustrate examples of color play interactions. She offers suggestions on how to pick the colors for your projects and includes several pages of Kona color swatch charts for you to use.

If you liked using solid fabrics before (like me), you will fall in love with them after viewing these gorgeous quilts. Amanda includes a wide range of skill levels and techniques in her book including strip piecing, machine applique, handwork, and non-traditional finishes such as prairie points and zig-zag bindings.

Color Essentials

Color Essentials Quilts by Amanda Murphy

My favorite part of the book is where she shows 3-4 alternate colorway possibilities for each quilt! It really gets your creative juices flowing. There is plenty of machine quilting eye-candy for you to drool over and I was so proud to read that she even quilted a few of them herself!

Illusion Pillow

Illusion Pillow, Pieced and Quilted by Amanda Murphy

Throughout the book, Amanda encourages you to move outside your comfort zone and experiment with new color combinations that you may not have tried before. I think this is a wonderful approach to quilt-making which can yield beautiful results.

Color Essentials is published by Stashbooks (C&T) and it consists of a total of 143 gloriously illustrated pages with full-color diagrams throughout. You can purchase it on Amazon or at your favorite Quilt Shop!

Modern Neutrals Blog Tour

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Modern NeutralsWelcome to all of those swinging by my stop on Amy Ellis’ Modern Neutrals Blog Tour.

I first met Amy when I participated in her fabulous Blogger’s Quilt Festival that she hosts twice a year. I was beyond thrilled to be one of the Spring 2013 winners and even more so with my prize – 4 quilting books of my choice from Martingale.

My first pick was Amy’s book Modern Neutrals – A Fresh Look at Neutral Quilt Patterns and now I’m happy to tell you about it – be sure to scroll to the end for a giveaway!

I absolutely adore the cover quilt with its striking geometry and “pod” looking blocks.

Another favorite of mine is Prism. I have a thing for Kona Solids and Amy has artfully combined solids with tone on tone neutrals in shades of black, white and grey to create a very bold and beautiful quilt. I love it!

Prism

Prism by Amy Ellis; Pieced by Trish Poolson; Quilted by Natalia Bonner

Placid Curves speaks to my need for order amid chaos. I love the illusion of curves, even though this quilt is made completely from squares and rectangles. The careful placement of color creates quite a bit of contrast in this warm neutral quilt!

Placid Curves by Amy Ellis; Pieced by Audrie Bidwell; Machine Quilted by Natalia Bonner

Placid Curves by Amy Ellis; Pieced by Audrie Bidwell; Machine Quilted by Natalia Bonner

There are a total of 15 full sized quilts in the book, each thoughtfully illustrated with clear diagrams and instructions. The photography is very well done, too. You can see details of the beautiful quilting on each quilt, which for me is a plus since I love pouring through books for quilting inspiration.

I especially like it when authors take the time to add just a little bit more to their books, in the way of interesting things to read about the quilts. There’s a section in the front about working with neutrals in neutral spaces, plus several pages of quiltmaking basics at the end – a great refresher or reference for those relatively new to quilting.

Helpful tips are sprinkled throughout the book, along with some options on making a few of the quilts in different sizes. I would definitely recommend Modern Neutrals as a great inspiration manual for making beautiful neutral quilts!

Piked Peaks

Piked Peaks

Shifting Sands

Shifting Sands

Circuit Board

Circuit Board

 

Happy blog hopping! 2013 Blog Tour Schedule:

Craftsy Class Review: Dot to Dot Quilting by Angela Walters

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Dot to Dot Quilting is the 3rd in a series of  online machine quilting classes by Angela Walters. Along with her other two classes, Machine Quilting Negative Space, and Free Motion Quilting with Feathers, Angela helps you to conquer your fear of machine quilting your own quilts.

Her warm, humorous manner along with her motto, “close enough is good enough” really put me at ease in this class. Even though she is a professional long arm quilter, Angela Walters teaches this class entirely on a domestic machine. Can we say “versatile”?

Dot to Dot Quilting

Dot to Dot Quilting is a way to quilt intricate designs on your quilt top with little to no marking, using points on the quilt as a guide.

Angela covers 3 of her favorite quilting motifs in this class (starbursts, lattice and diamonds), plus some cool FMQ variations for borders, sashing and blocks that create entirely different looks. In this class Angela shares how she thinks it’s easier to learn one design and tweak it 5 different ways, rather than learning 5 different designs. Clever!

After watching the first couple of lessons, I quickly quilted up these little diamond and starburst sample motifs, just to get the hang of it.

FMQ Practice

Dot to Dot Practice

Being able to watch Angela quilt “live” on video, then being able to pause and try it out immediately is an excellent way to learn. 🙂 I really like how I can go back and rewatch the segments again, to review what I just learned and make sure I really get it.

Here are a couple more quilting doodles I tried, to get a feel for the process. I just used some scraps I had lying around, quilting with whatever thread was in the machine.

Filling in the Diamonds

Filling in the Diamonds

Because I enjoy learning and sharing free-motion quilting techniques, I appreciate it when Angela demonstrates things that I also teach, such as using a blending thread whenever possible. This allows you to see the quilting texture, rather than the stitches themselves.

Dot to Dot Quilting is broken down into 8 different segments of about 8 to 10 minutes each, plus an introduction at the beginning. This is a wonderful way to watch because for me personally, I only have about 10 minutes of uninterrupted free-time at any given point in the day!

FMQ Practice

More of Christa’s Quilt Doodles – This is Fun!

Angela first shows how to quilt the designs in roughly square shapes, then uses a variation on a theme to show how to fit the designs into other shapes, too. Her designs are very scale-able, which means you can quilt them in any block size, large or small. She shows how to quilt them in a regular, classic way, and then she changes it up by starting off-center, or in a corner. The possibilities are endless!

My favorite motif I quilted is this diamond star. I stitched it completely with my free-motion foot and no marking. 🙂

Filling in the Diamonds

Christa’s Diamond Star, FMQ

Angela states that quilting is like handwriting – she can show you how to form the shapes, but it’s up to you on how you develop your own signature style.

At the end of the class, she shares tons of different examples of dot-to-dot quilting from quilts that she has finished. This was one of my favorite parts of the class – I love looking at all that quilting eye candy!

Dot to Dot Quilting

Angela Walters’ Dot to Dot Quilting

Angela includes a free sample pattern in the course materials along with stitching diagrams and quilting design variations. I recommend tracing them with your fingers or sketching them on a piece of paper before quilting to get your “muscle memory” flowing.

Another highlight of the class is reading the comments left by other class members as they watch. Both Angela and the other classmates are quick to answer the questions I have while watching. I highly recommend Dot to Dot Quilting!

Craftsy Class Review – Design It, Quilt It by Cindy Needham

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I just love taking as many quilting classes as I can. And when I can watch them over and over again, that’s like icing on the cake! I just finished watching Cindy Needham’s Design It, Quilt It: Free-Form Techniques on Craftsy and let me tell you, it was time well spent!

Design It Quilt ItThe entire class is composed of 11 lessons about 1/2 hour in length (give or take a few minutes). I like this format because I can watch one section at a time here and there when I have a few spare moments.

In addition to giving tons of machine quilting tips and explaining many tools of the trade, Cindy’s class includes an excellent basting tutorial, too. Here’s one of my recent quilts that I basted, after watching this segment of her class:

Safety Pin Bating

In Design It, Quilt It, Cindy covers such basics as threads and tension, plus many excellent techniques and tools. She’s really good at trouble-shooting so you can get the most out of your sewing machine.

Cindy focuses a lot on designing your own quilting motifs by combining stencils and other ideas. She distils her designs down to three basic shapes which are repetitive lines, circles and S curves. Plus she has an entire section of the class devoted to feathers and another covering backgrounds or “filler” quilting.

She also includes some wonderful instruction on making borders fit. Cindy does a great job of covering all the basics, and I walked away really feeling like I had the keys to machine quilting success.

Cindy NeedhamCindy also does an excellent job of answering my questions whenever I have them. Each Craftsy class has a forum where you can post questions and read questions and answers posted by other students, too. Plus, you can strut your stuff and upload pictures of your work for others too see and comment on.

I just found out Cindy will be coming to my local quilting guild to teach a series of classes later this year and I can’t wait! She’s one of my machine quilting heroes because she encourages others to try it and quilt it themselves. I agree with her – it’s not that hard once you try. 🙂

Craftsy Class Review – Machine Quilting Negative Space by Angela Walters

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While I have a little down time on vacation, I thought it would be fun to review a few of the Craftsy Quilting Classes I’ve signed up for.

Quilting Negative SpaceToday I will begin with Angela Walters’ Quilting Negative Space class.

I first heard about this class months ago when it came out. I didn’t sign up for it right away because I knew I would be taking a class from her live in person earlier this year at QuiltCon. Her live class was so fantastic, that when I returned I immediately signed up for both of her Craftsy classes.

Angela Walters

Christa and Angela at QuiltCon

Since I couldn’t possibly remember everything from Angela’s live class, the online Craftsy classes are such a great resource.

I can go back to them again and again, post questions in class and rewind and rewatch any segment of the class.

Angela’s online class is different enough from her live class that I didn’t feel like I was wasting my money by taking both.

Plus her approachable manner and in-depth explanations were easy to follow.

The class is broken up into 10 segments or lessons, focusing on things such as combining designs, and changing scales.

Throughout the class, Angela demonstrates how to achieve beautiful quilting with little or no marking, which I really like.

One of the often overlooked elements of quilt design is sketching out your ideas first. Angela covers this in great detail and she includes tips on how to apply your sketched designs to the actual quilt. She covers a little about thread selection, too.

Extra QuiltingMy favorite tip of hers is to use a blending thread, whenever possible. You want the quilting texture to show, not the thread! One of my favorite designs she teaches is how to quilt flowers which I used in my Hugs ‘n Kisses quilt, above.  They are a lot easier than you might think!

Below is another of the machine quilting samples I was able to stitch after watching Quilting Negative Space. It was fun to combine the pebbles and swirls together into one motif. Angela also covers woodgrain, tiles, leaves, wavy lines, plume feathers and more.

Swirls and Pebbles

I just checked the stats on Craftsy and over 5000 people have signed up for this class so far! I enjoyed Machine Quilting Negative Space so much that I’ve already signed up for her next Craftsy class, Free Motion Quilting with Feathers (watch for my review on that one soon – it’s on sale, too!)

Angela Walters FeathersAnd oh yeah – even though Angela quilts on a long arm and I quilt on my Bernina, the design principles she teaches are easily applicable to both. If you can only afford to take one Craftsy Quilting class – this is the one to choose!