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!