I was sent this book, Fabric Embellishing – The Basics & Beyond several months ago for review. I didn’t mean to sit on it so long, but I wanted to make sure I spent enough time with it to give it an adequate review. When I first opened it, I spent a couple hours turning every page, amazed at the wonderful ideas and creations of this group of artists.
First of all, I love, love, love that this book is spiral-bound. I’ve always loved spiral-bound books because of being left handed. They just seem easier to look at and especially to work from. I also love that it’s easy to read, the pictures are beautiful, and the directions are easy to follow. They also are techniques that I WANT to try.
So I’ll tell you more about this book and then I’ll show you one of the projects I completed. This book, published by Landauer Books is a treasury of fabric embellishing techniques. The authors suggest the reader take a year and try one technique per week and end up with a fabric workbook with 8 x10 pages.
There are 51 techniques featuring a large photo of each technique made into a page for this workbook. The opposite page shows the step-by-step instructions with the supply list and helpful pictures. There are tips throughout the book to help with many of the techniques. There also are additional pages featuring the artistry of the four authors, Ruth Chandler, Liz Kettle, Heather Thomas and Laren Vlcek.
Some of the embellishing techniques you will learn include fabric manipulation, images on fabric, discharge dyeing, rusting fabric, fabric foiling, rubber stamping, sashiko, ricing, and many more.
So let’s get going on one of the techniques. This is called Crazy Quilt Deconstructed.
I loved their example. And here are the instructions.
I decided to challenge myself and only use fabric from my 5 x 5 inch charm squares stash. These squares came from numerous swaps years ago when I was really into quilting. There were lots of calico and other prints I really didn’t like. So here’s just part of my pile of charms.
So I dug through this pile and through the big bin and came up with these fabrics that I randomly placed, right side up, on stabilizer. I moved them around until I was happy with them.
They were pinned, then turned over and ironed to fuse them to the stabilizer.
To hold them all down, I straight stitched randomly over the pieces. I am pretty limited as to what I can do with my old Elna, so mine is not as fancy as the one in the book. However, I did run a daisy stitch down the piece after that picture was taken. I also added some embellishments and then added it to the 8 x 10 workbook page.
The dots are crystals. The butterflies were cut from butterfly ribbon. This was so much fun. I’ve always been intimidated with crazy quilts, but this was fun and easy.
Another technique they showed, which I have done before is printing on ribbon. Here is my tutorial on printing on ribbon.
There are so many other techniques I want to try, but I wanted to get this review posted. I’ll show you a couple more I’m working on in future posts.
This would be a fun project for a sewing or quilting group to get together and work on or even just a bunch of friends. This would also be a great addition to your crafting book library. You can purchase this book through your favorite bookseller, quilt shop, or from Landauer.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes. The opinions expressed here are 100% my own. I was under no obligation to offer a positive review and received no monetary compensation.
Well just how cool is that! I never knew quilting to be THAT easy, I always thought of it as a very long and arduous process. This looks fun, thanks! Did you say you’re doing one a week from the book? well, it was worth a try, haha…
Hi Cindy Sue, No, I’m not going to do a technique a week! But I definitely will try a couple more. It was fun and easy – once I made the decision on which fabrics to use.
Oh, love it! The colors go beautifully together and I love the butterflies 🙂