'15 Minutes of Play'

A copy of '15 Minutes of Play' arrived on Saturday and I devoured it in more or less one go yesterday.  Super book, with lots of inspiration for improvisational quilts, plus some techniques to get you started if you aren't already familiar with more freeform scrappy quilts. Kathie at Inspired by Antique Quilts mentioned it a couple of weeks ago.  I really got the book as a present for Glyn, but it's great eye candy for me as well, and I like Victoria's writing style - a very 'readable' book.

You can check out where Victoria's site where a lot of her quilts are shown in the gallery section.  There's a great pic of the 'Starburst' quilt on Lazy Gal Quilting and more on Victoria's blog too.

Several quilts which will be shown in my exhibition at Quiltfest are made with similar techniques - I don't seem to have any photos of them on this laptop right now! Some of the older ones are shown in 'Compendium of Quilting Techniques' - the background squares in the centre of 'November' (2000 - page 89) were made with an improvisational technique, as were the panels used in 'Kesa' (2004? - page 134) and the strip section in 'Golden Fifties' (2005 - in the quilt gallery section - there's a work in progress pic below). I touched on some of the made-fabric methods in that book as well, but split out into different sections including things like random Log Cabin, foundation pieced strips and stitched and flipped crazy patchwork, with a little more improvisational piecing inclueded in the techniques section of 'Japanese Taupe Quilt Blocks'.  Techniques like these are creative and fun to do, but if you want a book full of this kind of inspiration, '15 Minutes of Play' is hard to beat.