I went to the Loussac Library fall book sale last weekend. I was hoping to find good Japanese reading material, but they were pretty much cleaned out on that. I did find some quilt books, though. I only ended up with one because this one lady snapped up every quilt book but the one I was holding while I was flipping through it to decide if I actually wanted it or not. I’m very happy with my one book, though.
The New Quilting and Patchwork Dictionary by Rhoda Ochser Goldberg is a nice quilting resource book. The first third or so of the book is information on different quilting supplies and techniques. Concise introductions all around. The rest of the book is quilt block patterns built on grids to make drawing them out at any size for templates a piece of cake. There are pre-drawn templates for basic geometric shapes at the back, right before the quilt block index.
The real gem in this book, though, is page 1, which I’m sharing with you.
A quilt log! Plans for quilts to make in the near future and others to make eventually when I have the appropriate skill have been circling around my head and scattered through text files on my desktop since I first bought cloth. A quilt log gives me a single place to keep all that information, in addition to the above-mentioned benefits. You’d think something as simple as a quilt log wouldn’t be that important for posterity, but between my recent world history class and having a genealogist for a friend-sister, I’ve come to realize just how important such things are to really understanding the people of a given era and area. I’m not exactly representative of the average, I don’t think (one of the pages going into my quilt log is for a fussy-cut Super Mario Bros. quilt I’m planning for the distant future, for instance), but maybe that’ll make my quilt log more interesting to anyone who bothers to read it later.
Like the author of the book, I’ve opted to keep a three-ring binder. I will (hopefully) fill it to overflowing at some point in the future and have to split my log into multiple binders and/or transfer it to a bigger binder. For now, however, I’m using one of my ridiculously old binders that I’ve been keeping since middle school — or maybe earlier — simply because it’s a shame to throw away a good one.
I keep a log. I really like being able to look back through it and get ideas.
The binder I’m using happens to have dividers in it already, so I’m planning to keep three sections for ideas, in progress, and completed quilts. :D The page I put up a picture of is one of the ideas.