Gardeners who quilt will find many suitable craft books. Here are reviews of some garden quilting titles that I’ve found helpful. These were released by the American Quilter’s Society.


Machine Freehand Patterns

By Nan Moore, this offers a treasure-trove of quilting designs that will appeal to gardeners. This features over 90 wonderful designs. The author provides all of the basics on machine quilting techniques. This book shows how to easily change directions while quilting. Each design has arrows that show the direction of the stitching. This title explains how to turn corners and stitch double borders in one pass.

These designs can be sized to fit any space, small to large. The patterns are organized by topic. There are chapters for borders, blocks, all-over designs, meanders, and faux pantographs.

Among the designs are many that will have special appeal to gardeners. There are gorgeous patterns featuring flowers, leaves, and vines of all sorts as well as bushes, wreaths, and bouquets. Among the individual flowers are dahlias, columbines, roses, peonies, tulips, and primroses. This also features various nature themes that will be of interest to gardeners. These include butterflies, bees, and dragonflies.


Quilting UFO’s With Helen’s Hints

By Helen Squire, this title is suitable for both machine and hand quilting. It offers over a hundred quilting designs. This book will appeal especially to gardeners who quilt.

For each unfinished quilt or UFO, the author poses four basic questions that quilters need to answer. These usually concern the method of quilting, the batting type, the intended use, and theme/occasion.

Each chapter presents a quilt top and sample quilting designs. An entire chapter is devoted to plants and flowers. Among the plants are crocuses, iris, myrrh, frankincense, and sweet storax. In addition, many of the other designs also feature flowers, plants, fruits, and nature themes as well.

The author encourages quilters to consider the quilting design as they select quilt fabric as large scale and showy prints can limit one’s choices when it comes to choosing a quilting design. This book shows how an ethnic, folk-art style quilt requires a different approach than a medallion quilt.

This title also presents the steps that the author uses in creating a new design pattern. Such a pattern will include separate designs for each quilt section, such as the blocks, corners, borders, and sashes.

The patterns can be used as is or enlarged. This title also presents some of the author’s basic quilting tips or ‘Helen’s hints.’


Piecing With Pixels-Unique Quilts From Your Own Images

By Sandra Hart and Gudny Campbell, this features nine exciting quilt projects. This offers gardeners a wonderful opportunity to turn their garden and plant photos into stunning garden quilts.

It is an excellent guide to Adobe Photoshop Elements software. This title takes the guesswork out of digitizing your photos. It walks you through every step of the process. The authors explain what software and hardware you’ll need. They provide easy to follow, steps to the software.

It explains how to create and modify photos before printing the designs onto inkjet fabric sheets. The authors explain how to use the software for both appliquéd and patchwork projects. Use the software to add special effects to plain fabrics. An example includes frosting.

The delightful projects include beautiful landscape quilts. Among the projects are throws, wall hangings in various sizes, and table runners.

For each project, this features a list of fabrics and supplies and a list of the software/computer skills that are needed. There are step by step directions for the design process. For most projects, this offers additional versions or options.

For disclosure purposes I received review copies of these books from the publishers.