Foundation Piece Your Way to Spectacular Quilts

A review of Karen K. Stone Quilts by Karen K Stone

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Reviewed by Sharon Darling

Karen Stone worked with Penny McMorris of Electric Quilt Company to bring you patterns for eleven of Karen's most popular quilts. The book's cover quilt, Cinco de Mayo, has fascinated me from the moment I saw it on the cover of a magazine. I couldn't imagine how she managed to corral all of those fabrics into a spectacular design. I was even more amazed that she used all kinds of fabrics from calicos to batiks including reproductions and they all look great together.

All fabrics Go Together

The most valuable information I got from the book is how Karen chooses the fabrics and how she organizes them. You don't have to be a color genius to do it but you do have to love fabric. After reading the steps she uses, her quilts seem very do-able to me.

All of the blocks are foundation pieced and can be printed from the CD that installs into your EQ5 software as projects. I like this approach because I don't have to wade through hundreds of block patterns to find the ones I need for the particular quilt I'd like to make. Patterns come printed in the book too so you can trace them if you don't happen to own EQ5.

Interchangeable Pieces

Karen's approach to her patterns is to number the arcs in a special way so that you can interchange pieces from one block to another and know they will fit perfectly. This feature gives you unlimited possibilities for each block.

There are no easy quilts in this book when looking at the sheer number of pieces of fabric used but they are all foundation pieced in sections. If I could only buy one of these two parts of the Karen K Stone Quilts products , I'd choose the book because of the spectacular quilt photos and the valuable text about color that also includes sewing tips to keep you out of trouble with assembly. But if I wanted to make one of these fabulous quilts with lots of blocks, I'd choose the CD to eliminate all the tracing of patterns.

Everyone should read this book because of the insight into color and fabric choices that Karen shares and her organizational skills she employs in her quilt making. I think I have an idea for all those scraps of fabric and fat quarters I have been collecting.I can use up some of my "dogs" which are the fabrics I look at wondering what I was thinking to make me want to buy that fabric. Everything looks good in Karen's style quilts.

Where To Buy This Book

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