Book Review: Simply Stunning Woven Quilts

If you haven't stumbled onto this book -- Simply Stunning Woven Quilts by Anna Faustino (C&T Pub. 2008) -- you'll want to take a look at it. I've been meaning to review it for a while now, because it's one of the most innovative books I've seen in a while.

Here's the thing that impresses me the most about this book: it takes a basic concept (weaving) and shows you how to do it in increasingly complex and amazing ways. And truly, Faustino's instructions lead you from the basic principles into more interesting and unusual and complicated ways to use weaving. The pieces that result are the sorts of ones that you'd stand in front of at a quilt show or art gallery, looking closely and thinking, "How the heck did she DO that?"

And, even better (for those of us who like relatively instant gratification) it's fused. And while it is very much like the weaving we all did as elementary school kids with strips of construction paper, Faustino's spin on it is much more appealing. If you could do that construction paper thing, you can do this.

The photos and illustrations provide very clear examples on how to cut and assemble to get the eye-popping woven results. Faustino shows how to use the woven technique in both subtle and bold ways, for a very different background or a main feature in a piece. There are woven log cabin pieces that are gorgeous, and woven circles of graduated color that make my fingers itch to start cutting fabric.
As I read this (over and over -- and it amazes me every time) I'm impressed at how Faustino has come up with an easy technique for a complicated look, and then figured out all sorts of different ways to use it, AND she's sharing it all here.

I'm very eager to try this out. There are innumerable possibilities for using this technique.