Quilters Playtime: Games With Fabric

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful fun for adventurous quilters
Review: I am a quilter who absolutely loves playing with fabric and hates measuring. Dianne's book is my dream workbook--it's full of ways to play with your fabrics and learn new approaches to creating a beautiful quilt, and encourages a playful, risk-taking spirit.

The book is divided into different "games," like Hopscotch, where you create a series of narrow, then wide, then narrow pieces that really do look like the hopscotch boards of our childhood; Tiddlywinks, with multicolored concentric ovals and circles arranged in patterns; Musical Chairs, with colors shifting from skewed block to skewed block in an orderly progression (until you throw in a Wild Card), and lots more. The best part is, Dianne shows you how to do each kind of improvisational piecing and then sets you free with lots of ideas and examples, so you can create something that is totally your own. The photos in the book are of wonderfully free-spirited quilts by several different quilters, and are in a lot of color schemes, though most are bright. Dianne encourages experimentation and ornamentation--there are plenty of beads, buttons, dangles and whirligigs here--and helps you get over your fear of cutting into big pieces of beautiful yardage by suggesting you "sneak up on them" and whack them into pieces, which then can go into a gloriously jumbled scrap basket that will trigger new ideas and combinations.
I just wish Amazon would post a cover photo and a "Take A Look Inside" section of the book. If you have any interest at all in improvisational quilting, you MUST get this book.