Teri Lucas Has A Great New Book Out!

Must buy it alert: “Color, Thread & Free-Motion Quilting” is quite aptly subtitled “Learn to Stitch with Reckless Abandon”. This is more information I have seen on thread in one place ever and the way Teri relates it to color just catapults it into a necessary book in every quilter’s sewing room. If you are a beginner, count yourself as super lucky that it’s out now and that you don’t have to make all the mistakes that people like me did!

I love that Teri has stitched out so many different fabric and thread combinations to make this a great reference guide for choosing threads to go into your quilts. For instance, a quilt that I am working on now “told me” it wanted yellow thread on the royal blue fabric; one look at the book to see how that stitched out and I realized that it might be perfect for a different quilt, but not for this one, and I changed my mind.

Relating to that, my favorite part of the book is the “Imperfect Color Wheel” where she instructs us in how to make unfinished pieces that demonstrate how colors work together. She has arranged fabrics by color, sung her poetic odes to those hues, and then stitched on them with various colors of thread. There is so much inspiration in both the colors and the designs chosen for these small pieces and some little quirks tended to show up as I read them. For instance, I had quite a giggle about an item buried in the bottom paragraph about the color Brown: “I started my quilt life with strong anti-machine-quilting feelings, and yet here I am, writing a book on color and thread and machine quilting.”

I’ve known Teri for eight or nine years now (Maybe more — time seems to go faster and faster!) and never knew that she felt that way about machine quilting! We met while we were both teaching at an AQS show in Knoxville TN along with Laura Wasilowski and Karen Stone and the four of us did a fair amount of hanging out together. We’ve also met up at Quilt Market and other quilt shows over the years and I got to go to New York City at one point and spent a few days sightseeing (and eating cannoli) with her. She has such a super reputation as a teacher so I was very excited about the book and all the information that would be accessible even if you aren’t able to take a class from her.

This book will definitely be one of my dog-eared favorites!

What Are Your Stay at Home Activities?

The last time I flew was March 13, flying home from the cancelled Dallas Quilt Show. After that, in an email cascade of cancellations, all of my workshops and lectures disappeared for the whole year! I was all of a sudden living a “retirement life” that I thought would come years from now. So I’ve been reading, baking, running 25-30 miles a week (a weird passion of mine that didn’t manifest until last year at age 70-1/2 – who does that??), walking a few miles in the morning with my husband. I’ve joined that Sourdough Bread Baking Brigade that one reads about, gotten used to not going to the hairdresser or the nail person or the facialist – man, was I spoiled!

But I haven’t done much sewing. My sewing has always been deadline based. Class samples, quilts to show at a workshop, ideas that I wanted to try out so I could demonstrate them to classes. Ruler work kept me excited for quite a while, especially as the new ones just kept rolling out and I was sewing my brains out in a futile attempt to keep up. But now? Since my work came to a screeching halt? Very little sewing.

Last week I did go into the sewing room; I was playing with some fat quarters of the Ombre Blooms fabric and had a pattern called Ombre Gems from Quilty Love. Pretty straightforward to cut and sew and I really liked the fabrics. So I cut and sewed all the blocks and laid them out on the floor in the master bedroom, the biggest open floor space I have:

I think I am really going to like it! It won’t be quite as big as I like to make my quilts, but that’s OK, I cut some extra squares to do a pieced border between two white borders. Now all I have to do is get motivated to get those blocks pieced together!

So what are you doing with your home time? Do you have more of it than you used to? Less? Are you sewing more? Less? Making some beautiful things? I’d love to see pics!