Quilting by Design

This book features a huge number of quilting design patterns. Many free-machining design books focus on the patterns as a way of building up your skills and repertoire but this one approaches it in a slightly different way, looking instead at planning and designing a pattern to cover a whole quilt.
Planning the whole quilting area can be quite intimidating but Jessica breaks it down simply, into triangles. By thinking of a pattern to fill a triangle and then building the triangles together, you can build up an area easily. She considers the type of patterns that are good for stitching around quilt corners and for creating circular patterns.
An element of computer design comes into the book and all designs are included on a CD for using in this way. The software suggested and used to illustrate the book is Inkscape, which is free to download (although, if you have your own graphics software such as Adobe Illustrator, you will easily be able to adapt the instructions for use here). Photoshop and other photo editing software are not so useful as they use Raster graphics (pixels) which dont respond so well to manipulation. The computer tutorials make it easier to create your own designs and resize but if you are technophobic, you can use the CD to print the designs and plan by hand.
The patterns are divided into 10 suites including Baroque, Florals and Angels, Olive Leaves, Shaggy Leaves and others. All the designs are printed out and there are also additional layout design suggestions. These are particularly good for the reader to be able to visualise how a combination would work and in what direction to stitch. The designs are all very ornate and produce some very impressive motifs to follow. A helpful appendix includes the steps Jessica works along to create a design from scratch.

Mix and match motifs from 10 distinct suites of designs to customize and fill every space on your quilt. The 30 basic motifs included in the book and on the accompanying CD as PDFs come in standard machine quilting and embroidery formats. In addition, Schick provides instructions on how to edit the CD's graphics files in Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, CorelDRAW and other programs.

Well known for her design and digitizing skills, Jessica provides 155 free-motion quilting designs to quilt by hand or machine. Included with the book is a CD of all 155, as well as 30 basic motifs, that can be transferred to computer-guided long-arm and embroidery machines. Jessica guides the reader through using the designs as they are, or modifying them through resizing, editing, and rearranging the basic motifs to create new designs to fit any space. Whether you want to use the patterns as presented or get creative and make them uniquely yours, this book has got you covered.

I've already finished one quilt using this book and it's great. The directions are easy to follow, and I used one of the free software packages she mentioned to resize the designs. Love it!

This is a book which aims to encourage quilters to adapt and experiment with the designs on the accompanying CD. There is practical advice on planning the overall quilting. Large areas can be broken into smaller sections, e.g. an empty diamond space can be divided into two triangles. Another suggestion is to put a photo of the quilt on the screen and add the quilting designs on top, rotating and resizing them to fit. There are also directions for locating free downloads to copy and paste. These are ornamental intricate designs and require good technical computer skills.