Description
Quilt Talk®
I wrote a book and it’s called Quilt Talk®!
It’s full of fun paper-pieced patterns for a full alphabet (letters, numbers, special characters and accents), and a dozen lovely projects that you can customize with your own words.
You can order a signed one from me here, or one without my scrawl from Powell’s, my favorite bookseller here, or Amazon here. And you can always ask for it at your local quilt store or bookstore too. Remember… if you want them to be around for you, you need to buy from them sometimes! And If you’re not sure which way to buy, read this first.
Here’s some info about the book:
1. What it is!
- The book is designed around a paper-pieced font.
- There are upper and lower case letters, numerals, punctuation, and all the special characters above the numbers on your keyboard.
There are also some accents that allow the letters to speak languages other than English: umlaut, tilda, cedilla, circumflex, accute, and grave. I’m quite proud of these!
Why paper-pieced? Paper piecing is the easiest way to get pinpoint accuracy in odd shapes or angles.- Along with the characters, there’s a great chapter on how to set them into custom text, much like setting old-school typography.
- There are easy instructions for resizing the characters to fit any words you can dream up.
2. Projects
- I designed 12 projects for you, from small things like placemats and the scrap buckets on the cover, up to wall, snuggle, and bed-sized quilts.
- Most of the phrases are sassy, encouraging, inspiring, or nerdy: both Star Wars and Star Trek are covered!
- Each project has additional notes on how to fit your own ideas into the word spaces.
- All of the projects are designed for easy straight seam construction (no set in pieces, no curves, no y-seams). Once you make the letters, they are essentially blocks that then get set in rows. There is nothing in here that a confident beginner can’t manage!
- For additional inspiration, there’s a gallery section of wordy projects made by some dear friends.
3. Things that matter about the book design
- I skipped writing a basics chapter on how to use your rotary cutter, etc., as I thought you’d rather have more projects!
- There’s a brief chapter on how I do paper piecing, and it’s illustrated with step-by-step photos. You can see a few pages of this in Amazon’s “Look Inside” preview.
- I go over how I do pre-cutting for paper-piecing – it makes the paper-piecing easier to manage, and it saves on fabric.
- I also added a chapter on how to choose fabrics for letters to make them shine.
- The majority of the patterns are on a jumbo pull-out in the back of the book. You tear this out and cut it up, which makes for easier and flatter copying.
I made sure the upper and lower case pattern of each letter are back to back – if you find the “A” in your pile of letters, turn it over to find the “a”.- The numbers are also paired back to back.
- There were a few too many characters for the pull-out, so the extras (and the ones I thought might be the least used) are at the end of the book.
4. Things that matter about the Paper-Piecing design
- The seam allowance isn’t drawn around the blocks because most of the time you’ll be scaling them, which would give you inaccurate cutting lines. However, because I’ve sliced the seam allowance off plenty of paper-pieced blocks, I put the words “add 1/4” seam allowance” around the edges of all the blocks so that you (and I) have a reminder.
- Some of the sewing lines on the characters start at odd angles, so I extended the lines into the seam allowance to lead you in to starting your seam at the right place.
- Some of the blocks are constructed in multiple sections, so I added alignment lines so you can get them joined up without too many seam ripper moments.
- In each block pattern the letter is shaded but the background isn’t, so it’s easy to see what you’re working on. And I shaded with a light dot pattern rather than a gray fill to save you some printer ink.
5. Helpful things for RETAILERS
If you or one of your teachers needs to pick my brains about teaching a project from Quilt Talk® (or anything else I design) please get in touch! I’m happy to help you get the most out of my products!
Class Plans: There are four workshop outlines for projects from Quilt Talk® listed on C&T’s site: http://www.ctpub.com/pages/class-plans/quilt-talk-class-plan.html
Retail Tie-In Products:
- Newsprint or Vellum paper-piecing paper (C&T)
- Sewing machine needles
- Extra rotary cutter especially for cutting paper
- Small rulers – especially any with a gripping back like Olfa, OmniGrip, and Creative Grids
- Rotating mats
- Add a Quarter Ruler
- Tweezers
- Small sharp pointed scissors, and small curved scissors for trimming at the surface
- Seam ripper!
- Supreme Slider to make the machine bed slippery
- Mini Pressing boards
- Mini or cordless Irons
- Various wooden Wedge tools instead of finger pressing
- Spray starch, Mary Ellen’s Best Press, Flatter by Soak
There are also some accents that allow the letters to speak languages other than English: umlaut, tilda, cedilla, circumflex, accute, and grave. I’m quite proud of these!
Why paper-pieced? Paper piecing is the easiest way to get pinpoint accuracy in odd shapes or angles.
All of the projects are designed for easy straight seam construction (no set in pieces, no curves, no y-seams). Once you make the letters, they are essentially blocks that then get set in rows. There is nothing in here that a confident beginner can’t manage!
I made sure the upper and lower case pattern of each letter are back to back – if you find the “A” in your pile of letters, turn it over to find the “a”.
Some of the sewing lines on the characters start at odd angles, so I extended the lines into the seam allowance to lead you in to starting your seam at the right place.
