Allie Aller's Crazy Quilting: Modern Piecing & Embellishing Techniques for Joyful Stitching

Wonderful book on crazy quilting!

As someone who loves crazy quilting and is always looking for new ideas, I had to get Allie Aller's Crazy Quilting book. First, it has one of the best subtitles for a quilting book: "Modern Piecing and Embellishment Techniques for Joyful Stitching". What a great way to remind us why we sew and quilt in the first place! The book is divided into seven sections that cover all aspects of Crazy Quilting: ' Collecting Your Materials and Tools ' Creating Your Own "Fabrics" ' Four Ways to Build Crazy Quilt Blocks ' Eye Candy: Embellishment! ' Gallery of Inspiration ' Projects ' Work in Progress - A Crazy Quilt from Start to Finish The author does an excellent job explaining all her techniques and augments this with lots of photos. For example, in the tools section she discusses all the different types of threads you can use, and provides many photos of various samplers that show how the threads look when they are used in stitching. This is very useful when trying to figure out what threads are needed for the look you want for your quilt. Likewise, the embellishment section contains numerous photos of embroidery stitches and ways to use them in the quilts. She discusses how to use beads, lace, and other types of trim, as well as how to create three dimensional effects (flowers, leaves, insects). You won't want to throw out scraps of anything again! Part of the fun with crazy quilting is using all the scraps of fabric to create a unique foundation for your embellishments. There are tons of options for the types of fabric you can use and what you can do with them - Allie discusses all of them! In addition, she provides step by step instructions for how to use photo transfer to create unique fabrics -- even without buying the expensive transfer paper or fabric sheets from Jo-Ann's! (hint, think freezer paper). Four different techniques for creating foundations are shown. I found this section extremely useful because I was looking for ways to create foundations that didn't lo...