That Dorky Homemade Look by Lisa Boyer

That Dorky Homemade Look by Lisa Boyer

Fed up with feeling like you can't meet the standards of the Quilt Police? Do you want to quilt for comfort and pleasure -- and not to win some high-falutin' quilting contest? Weary of worrying about what others will think of your color choices -- or your pieced points? Or your applique stitches? That Dorky Homemade Look: Quilting Lessons from a Parallel Universe is the quilting companion you've been wishing for. Lisa Boyer, a popular columnist for Quilting Today magazine, gives you permission to quilt because you love it. She clears your path of all those merciless judgments pronounced by the Quilting Queens. She invites you to make quilts that are full of life. This funny book offers these nine principles for the 20 million quilters in America: 1. Pretty fabric is not acceptable. Go right back to the quilt shop and exchange it for something you feel sorry for. 2. Realize that patterns and templates are only someone's opinion and should be loosely translated. Personally, I've never thought much of a person who could only make a triangle with three sides. 3. When choosing a color plan for your quilt, keep in mind that the colors will fade after a hundred years or so. This being the case, you will need to start with really bright colors. 4. You should plan on cutting off about half your triangle or star points. Any more than that is showing off. 5. If you are doing applique, remember that bigger is dorkier. Flowers should be huge. Animals should possess really big eyes. 6. Throw away your seam ripper and repeat after me: Oops. Oh, no one will notice. 7. Plan on running out of border fabric when you are three-quarters of the way finished. Complete the remaining border with something else you have a lot of, preferably in an unrelated color family. 8. You should be able to quilt equally well in all directions. I had to really work on this one. It was difficult to make my forward stitching look as bad as my backward stitching, but closing my eyes helped. 9. When you have put your last stitch in the binding, you are still only half finished. Your quilt must now undergo a thorough conditioning. Give it to someone you love dearly--to drag around the house, wrap up in, spill something on, and wash and dry until it is properly lumpy. No reason not to have quiltmaking be a pleasure, says Lisa Boyer, who has as firm a grip on her sense of humor as she does on her quilting needles. If we didn't make Dorky Homemade quilts, all the quilts in the world would end up in the Beautiful Quilt Museum, untouched and intact. Quilts would just be something to look at. We would forget that quilts are lovable, touchable, shreddable, squeezable, chewable, and huggable -- made to wrap up in when the world seems to be falling down around us.

At the age of eight, Lisa Boyer learned herself to quilt by patching together a salesman's book of bedspread swatches with her toy sewing machine. She only took a few years off while earning her microbiology degree, working as a clinical laboratory scientist, and then becoming a sewing machine technician, pattern designer, quilt teacher, writer, magazine columnist, and mother. Quilting, hurricanes, veggies, shoes, and sewing machine maintenance, to name a few of her various interests, have prompted her to publish essays on a variety of themes. Lisa, dubbed the mad quilt scientist by her friends, blends her passion of quilting with her training in science and psychology to create some oddly peculiar philosophies. That Dorky Handmade Look--Quilting Lessons from a Parallel World, her first book, was published as a tribute to all the gorgeous, but not-quite-perfect, quilts and quilters out there.

In addition to her regular piece in Quiltworks Today Magazine, Lisa's essays have featured in Kauai Magazine and the Orange County Register. Quilting Today, Quiltworks Today, Miniature Quilts, and Kauai have all featured Lisa's quilts. She also appeared on HGTV's Simply Quilts as a guest. Lisa Boyer is a Southern California native.

She now resides in Hawaii with her husband, a clockmaker by trade, and their kid on the island of Kauai.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781561483518
ISBN 10	1561483516
Title	That Dorky Homemade Look
Author	Lisa Boyer
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Good Books
Year published	2002-05-16
Number of pages	124
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.