books:

	Complete Guide to Quilting (Better Homes and Gardens Creative Collection) Better Homes and Gardens Better Homes and Gardens, 2003 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 26 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This comprehensive how-to book focuses on instructing quilters in the fine art of quilting; it contains no patterns.

Valuable tips and expert trouble-shooting advice make projects easier and more enjoyable.


Better Homes and Gardens Quilting Book.

A great book for someone getting started in quilt making. Wife has had an earlier copy of this book for some time. This copy was ordered for a Grand Daughter that entered into a new career two years ago, that being a first time young wife dedicated to becoming a profesional Home maker. Am told this book is a step in the right direction.

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Great book for any Quilter.

This is the best book. It gives you lots of info on quilting both hand and machine. With lots of pictures and written info. Good book for the beginner.


Best "help Book" ever

This is a great book: Outstanding illustrations,super ideas, easy to follow directions.
Wish I HAD THIS BOOK TWO YEARS AGO. I bought one for my sister and she loves it.


Excellent resource

Great book full of very useful information. Only drawback was that I had to get it in paperback with out the spiral spine.


Useful but flawed basic encyclopaedia

I've been quilting (self-taught) for 18 months and bought this book about 6 months ago, so I'm not quite a beginner but still have plenty to learn. I use it as a reference work, but unfortunately I have learnt to use it with a pinch of salt. I made the mistake of using one of the tables for calculating how to cut a certain type of triangle. Thankfully I double-checked with a template before cutting my fabric, as the formula given was wrong, although I then had all the trouble of cutting fabric with two sets of markings on it. The formula for calculating the width of binding is also incorrect. I've not checked any of the other formulae, but I'm extremely wary of using them now.

This book has no overall contents section, which is awkward, although there is a contents page for each section at its start. It is divided into the following sections, and the pages are renumbered at the start of each section, e.g. 8-12, which again is an awkward way to do things, although it is useful that the section name is printed in the outside margin of every page.

1. Tools, notions and supplies
2. Fabric and colour
3. Planning pieced blocks
4. Planning the quilt top
5. Cutting
6. Hand piecing
7. Machine piecing
8. Hand and machine applique
9. Assembling the quilt top
10. Basting and backing
11. Hand and machine quilting
12. Binding and finishing
13. Specialty techniques
14. Glossary
15. Index

As you can see, this covers the whole process of traditional quilting fairly well, and as it's a long book, there is plenty in it. There are oodles of nice clear photographs, good headings, diagrams, charts and formulae (which may not be correct!), separate instructions for left-handers where applicable, and spaces at the end of every section where you may write your own notes.

Where techniques are discussed (a few aren't - bargello quilting gets a paragraph saying what it is but no instructions, for instance), they are usually discussed thoroughly. There are usually several ways to do anything in quilting, and a lot of the time this book will describe several options, though not always. For instance, it gives a variety of options for joining multiple pieces to make backing, but only one option (and not the most popular either) for joining two pieces of batting. I'm not wildly happy with the basting instructions generally, though they're certainly useful when used alongside other instructions. I also feel that a lot more space should be given to hand-quilting technique, where only one page is devoted to the all-important quilting running stitch. I can't judge the sections on machine-sewing as I have yet to learn how to use a sewing machine, but as is usual for quilting books, machine-sewing is assumed to be the norm. Where it comes into its own is in giving a lot more information about hand-sewing than most quilting books these days do, and as a hand-sewer I'm extremely grateful for that.

There are very few troubleshooting sections, which is a particular loss in a book which is giving out incorrect formulae: if you follow this book's instructions to the letter, you're going to run into problems. There are definitely gaps. For example, the only method suggested for marking up fabrics is to use templates, when many quilters prefer to calculate the piece sizes and draw them straight onto the fabric using an acrylic ruler (a method that is, in my experience, far more accurate and far quicker). It doesn't even discuss making sure your shapes will fit together the best way possible to use up the minimum fabric (personally I always sketch them out on graph paper first), let alone how to calculate how much fabric to buy.

The most serious omission is that this book is only interested in old-fashioned quilting. If you plan to spend your entire quilting career sticking to traditional geometric patterns based on repeated square blocks, you'll be fine - as long as you don't expect the book to teach you how to make any of these blocks! Some basic units, such as flying geese or a square within a square, are covered, and there are discussions on the grid underlying blocks as well as five pages of pictures of traditional blocks (a couple of which I'd say are wrong), but nowhere does the book walk you through putting together a traditional block. This is unusual in quilting books aimed at beginners, which usually give instructions for a few blocks and indicate the level of difficulty for each. If your only source of quilting instructions is this book, half of the blocks in the gallery will be beyond you, since there is absolutely no information on how to sew more complex blocks depicted such as the Mariner's Compass or Double Wedding Ring. To be honest, an encyclopaedia-style book should really have a much fuller block gallery than this.

If you want to learn how to make art quilts, or how to piece quilt tops that aren't made of geometrical repeating blocks, there isn't a word to help you. Ruth McDowell is a good author to go to there, and there are many books and websites discussing more unusual techniques.

I've reluctantly given this book three stars. There are too many important omissions in this book, and for a book that sets itself up as a start-to-finish bible, readers may be deceived into thinking that it will cover all of their needs. More importantly, some of the information is plain wrong and will wreck a quilt if followed literally, and some of the instructions give rather odd methods while ignoring the most commonly-used ones. If you take all of that with a pinch of salt, and have other quilting books around to fill the gaps, as well as checking techniques before using them on a full quilt, then it is certainly a very useful book to have in your quilting library.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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