Infuse your quilts with love--how to add your personal story and more meaning to your handmade quilts. In Wise Craft Quilts, celebrated quilt designer and crafter Blair Stocker shares ways to use cherished fabrics to make quilts with more meaning. Each of the twenty-one quilts featured here gathers a special collection of fabric, outlines a new technique, and spins a story. By using special fabrics as the starting point for each project—from a wedding dress to baby’s first clothes, worn denim, Tyvek race numbers, and more—the finished quilt is made even more special. Create quilts that have a story to tell and you’ll find a whole new level of appreciation for what they represent in your life and the lives of the ones you love.

Quilt along with Christa using walking-foot or free-motion techniques to create fabulous quilts--from start to finish--on your home sewing machine. Award-winning quilter Christa Watson shows you how with 8 different walking-foot designs and 10 free-motion quilting motifs, plus 12 inventive patterns to put all the quilting techniques to use! Go beyond quilting in the ditch--quilt parallel lines, radiating lines, and shattered lines as you turn straight stitches into walking-foot wonders that wow! Love the look of free-motion quilting but not sure where to begin? Start with simple stipples and expand your repertoire to include wandering waves, boxes, pebbles, loops, and many more. Discover Christa's top tips for machine-quilting success and learn to use quilting designs to enhance each part of the quilt, whether you're making a baby quilt, wall quilt, or throw.Video

A compendium of everything you need to know about that most essential of quilting notions thread! Sarah Ann Smith unravels the secrets behind how it's made, how to select the right thread for the right job, and how to use it to enhance your piecing, appliqu, and quilting. And not just thread! Learn about needles, machines, fabrics, stabilizers, marking tools, and more! Interspersed with the valuable nuts and bolts are small projects to put the information to work a needlekeeper and a thread tension sampler, to name just two. Sarah Ann's insights and tips will help you understand how and why certain tools and notions work best and when another option is a better choice.

Machine-quilting pro Lori Kennedy has taught hundreds of quilters how to start and, more importantly, how to improve their machine quilting. Now she's packed her vast knowledge, and more than 150 up-close photos, into 25 hands-on lessons you can turn to anytime you need guidance. Each lesson has a practice session and questions to help you evaluate what worked and where you may need a bit more practice. Whether you stitch your way through a lesson a day or save them for weekend quilting time, you'll soon be building skills and confidence, and quilting your projects with ease. You'll learn: Why it's important to start doodling (page 19) How to prevent drag or resistance when quilting a big quilt (page 44) When to mark, and ways to avoid marking pitfalls (page 72) How to create focal points and contrast with your quilting (page 116)

A concise guide to appliqué sewing and design, with projects included. Unleash your creativity with this book covering all of the basics of appliqué sewing and design! In this short introductory guide, this highly adaptable skill is described in step-by-step detail, with: Easy to follow projects Professional tips Fun variations and ideas

Ready for a machine quilting adventure? It's time to explore walking foot machine quilting with Leah Day! Specifically designed for quilting on a home machine, this style uses a walking foot to evenly feed the layers of your quilt to produce beautiful quilting stitches. Learn how to quilt thirty designs in seven quilt projects.