4/15/11

Book Review: Your Machine's Decorative Stitches



This is the first book of Karen Linduska, who is an art quilter from Illinois.  I became aware of this book when I saw it available for pre-order on the American Quilter's Society website.  I ordered it (prior to publication) some months ago and just received it yesterday. 

It's an interesting book, and unique in my library.  The objective is to teach the reader to use all those fancy stitches you have on your sewing machine.  I happen to have a Bernina, but it can be used with any machine.  If you don't have the specific stitch she's talking about, you can substitute a similar stitch.  There are also 12 projects included for practice and inspiration.  These two especially appealed to me, and they are representative of the others that you might choose from.




Very cute.  There's a good explanation of tools you might use as well as techniques for making the stitches longer or wider, or distorting them by either pushing or pulling the fabric faster or more slowly. 

I'm not sure when I'll get around to trying these, but I can imagine a project for the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative to try out some of her techniques.  I can recommend this book to anyone who's interested in putting those decorative stitches to work.  I've used them for quilting narrow borders on table runners and baby quilts before, but this book has given me some ideas about using the stitches in a more creative way.

3 comments:

WoolenSails said...

That looks like a good book, I want to use my machine more and in art pieces.

Debbie

Stray Stitches (Linda G) said...

Thanks for the review. Looks like an informative book. I have used decorative stitches to quilt a couple of candle mats but nothing like the demonstration pictures.

Rebecca Grace said...

Ooh, I must have missed this one when it came out! I have TONS of decorative stitches on my Bernina that I haven't gotten around to playing with yet. Thanks for linking this post up with Val's Archive Linky!