The Ultimate Guide to Machine Quilting - a Book Review

Book cover, for which photo credit goes to Brent Kane & Martingale 

The Ultimate Guide to Machine Quilting is an inspiring and unusual book.  It is co-written by two of Quilting Blogland's most beloved teachers and authors: Christa Watson and Angela Walters.  Their book skyrocketed to the top of the quilting book genre almost immediately upon publication.   Some of this incredible popularity might be because of who they are and their stellar reputations, but the rest of it has to do with the excellence of the book.  I'd like to share with you what makes me love this book. 

Inside cover, for which photo credit goes to Brent Kane & Martingale 

The tagline sums it up perfectly: "Learn When, Where, Why, and How to Finish Your Quilts"   (By the way, that white, wholecloth quilt is Angela's version of "Swirling Butterflies".)

The way the book is divided between Angela and Christa is so interesting. Christa focuses on quilting with your home sewing machine and Angela focuses on quilting with a long arm sewing machine. Every page is information packed and I learned so much while reading it!  They both explain in helpful detail how quilting differs between long arm and domestic sewing machines and they go into the advantages and challenges of each method.  Right from the start, Christa and Angela talk about their favorite tools, marking aids and threads.  Some of these are specific to their types of machines and some of it is transferable from method to method.  

Which brings me to something that took me by surprise:  I had this preconceived notion that I'd mostly be focusing on Christa's domestic sewing machine half of the book as I read.  I'm not a long arm sewing machine quilter, so thought that Angela's sections of the book wouldn't have as much information that I could use.  This was not at all the case!  All of their design ideas and techniques are incredibly helpful and interesting, no matter how you choose to quilt.  

One of my favorite aspects of the book is how Angela and Christa take turns teaching throughout each chapter.  When I got to where they each made their own version of each project I was in Reader Heaven.  They created modern quilts with patterns they designed especially to illustrate their lessons for quilting, so you, the reader, get to see two versions of every quilt!   For every project, each author discussed and showed how they decided what to quilt on the quilt.  Then they went about teaching the reader how to achieve these results.  It was very exciting to see how differently Angela and Christa approached each quilt pattern.  

Here's a photo of the opening pages for the "Directionally Challenged" project (a favorite!) to give you a glimpse of how the authors switch back and forth:

Chapter opening for "Directionally Challenged", for which photo credit goes to Brent Kane & Martingale

I think The Ultimate Guide for Machine Quilting is a "must have" book for anyone interested in learning how to quilt their own quilts or improve their quilting skills.  If you practice and master a few of the designs in this book and try a project or two, you will find that you have a really great go-to repertoire at your fingertips!   

After taking Christina Cameli's Wild Quilting class on Craftsy and now reading The Ultimate Guide to Machine Quilting, I'm more excited than ever to practice my machine quilting!  

My only "problem" with the book is that my bucket list just got longer.  I think my favorite project in the book, which is the whole cloth quilt you saw above, called "Swirling Butterflies" might be something I'd like to try.  This weekend got a little out of hand, so I only have just this one butterfly to show you. I traced the butterfly onto the fabric and then tried quilting it on my trusty Singer 301, because I needed to follow the lines.  I have better control over my speed on that sewing machine.

One little "Swirling Butterfly" - waiting for some background quilting

I love how Christa's butterfly design has a Davinci-esque flying machine look to it!  :)  Just that pattern alone made me thrilled to have bought the book. 

I highly recommend The Ultimate Guide to Machine Quilting!  You can purchase your own copy of the book, signed by both authors, at either Christa's or Angela's blog shops.  I did!  (These are not affiliate links.  I just loved the book.)

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Two last things to share:

My own book Crafted Appliqué... New Possibilities has been doing really well in the Amazon sales rankings too.  I peeked at the numbers on Sunday and the book had reached #62 in the Quilts and Quilting category and was #48 in Needlework!  I know that is due to all of you who have purchased books and thank you from the bottom of my heart for your interest!  Thank you, too, to those of you who have left such wonderful feedback for Crafted Appliqué on Amazon!  It means so much to me!

The Crafted Appliqué Blog Hop will begin on Monday, May 2nd!   I hope you will stop by often, because throughout the month of May (and a little into June) there'll be a whole lineup of terrific bloggers sharing their reviews of Crafted Appliqué and showing off amazing appliqué projects.  Plus...we'll be giving away a lot of really fun prizes too!

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