MennoLink Books and Music

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 appliqué, 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 a 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."

Copyright 2002.