Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Free-Motion Quilting: How To Add Texture, Design, and Style to Your Quilts

This excellent guide will take machine quilters from confident beginners to quilters who can expertly use patterns that go from simple to complex. Mortensen (Quilting Through the Year) is an award-winning professional long arm quilter. She spends little time on the mechanics of quilting (best left to the maker of the particular brand of machine), and there isn’t much info about choosing battings and threads. Instead, she focuses her book on the design: simple loops and swirls, textures upon textures, and complex florals and feathers. She stresses the importance of doodling with paper and pencil to build muscle memory. Those images can then be transferred to fabric and thread. Twice as much attention is given to swirly designs, but straight-line quilting—often preferred for modern quilts—gets ample coverage too. The book shows readers how to join the two styles in attractive ways.