Book Review: Collage + Cloth = Quilt

I haven't posted a book review here for a long time -- did you think that meant that I wasn't looking at (or buying) new books?!  Au contraire!  I continue my love affair with books and even when I'm not spending much time with fabric or my sewing machine, I'm always looking and reading and gathering inspiration.

So here's a book I've added to my collection recently. It's Collage+Cloth=Quilt: Create Innovative Quilts from Photo Inspirations by Judi Warren Blaydon (C&T Pub. 2010).  Because of the subtitle, I wondered when I first picked this book up whether it'd be another book on using photos transferred to fabrics.  But no, I was pleasantly surprised and impressed.  The main idea of the book involves choosing a few photographs, cutting them up to assemble a pleasing collage, and then using the collage as the basis for a quilt.

It's a great concept, and I'm impressed at how beautifully this book works through the process.  It makes the process of moving from images to collage to quilt very accessible and quite do-able.  There's a good discussion about choosing photographs for scale and composition.  There is a very useful connection shown between various collage arrangements and quilt formats.  The brilliance of this concept, of course, is that cutting up photos and arranging elements for a collage feels much less intimidating than cutting fabric and designing an art quilt.  So really, once you've got your collage set up in a way that excites and interests you, translating that into fabric feels like an easy jump.  You've already designed your quilt.

As is often the case with me, my favorite part of the book is the gallery at the back, which shows photo collages by various people (the author's students) and the quilts that resulted.  It's a very inspirational set of work.  I'm all set now to scour my photos to play with this idea. 

If you're looking for a new way to jump start your art quilting, this could be a fun new approach.