Dear Helen, Can You Tell Me?...All About Quilting Designs
by Helen Squire
review by L.
This oversize book is bound in spiral format to make it particularly easy to use. It is printed on lightweight card stock, and includes designs in multiple sizes which makes these designs quite adaptable. Since the book is oversize, it permits truly large designs - such as will fit an 18 inch block. Tidbits of information about quilting appear throughout the book. Patterns in the book are feathers, cables, curve designs, designs for borders, designs for blocks, and grids.
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  Baltimore Beauties and Beyond : Studies in Classic Album Quilt Applique Volume 1
by Elly Sienkiewicz and Bobbie Sloan
review by L.
Mrs. Sienkiewicz's books are a wonderful introduction to the highest form of fine needlework: the applique quilt based on quilts made in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, in the 1800s. They are a standard which serves as a model of design excellence. The first volume is primarily a text on how to applique, and is arranged in lessons in which the reader is shown, on a step by step basis, how to do the illustrated blocks. All blocks are shown in full color and full-size patterns are given.
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All of Mrs. Sienkiewicz's books are based on the traditional Baltimore Album quilts. The books are lavishly illustrated in full color. The patterns are based on papercuts, elaborate versions of what children used to do with scissors and folded paper, like snowflakes. One-fourth of the pattern is given fullsize in the book; the other three-fourths are mirror images of the first.
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