Fat Quarterly Shape Workshop for Quilters: 60 Blocks + a Dozen Quilts and Projects

A quartet of quilters started Fat Quarterly, an online magazine for quilters who respect tradition and support modernity. Although Bruecher hails from Germany, Jones and Greenberg from the U.K, and Adams from the U.S., the Internet allows them to form a bee as if living in neighboring hollows. In their colorful book, they exploit the guiding principle for their e-zine—sharing ideas and inspiration for creative projects with the wider, online community, but they focus their creativity on shapes, from squares and rectangles to circles and polygons. The patterns range nicely from simple nine patches (Jones’ “Book of Stamps”) to a complex octagonal horological background (Bruecher’s “Tickety Tock Clock”). Each pattern includes a list of materials and instructions with illustrations for cutting and assembly; many patterns, complete with templates, offer hints or background from the designer. Their colloquial writing suffers from mistakes in grammar as correctable as toe-catchers in quilting; jargon (“fussy cutting”) is defined in the section on quilting basics, which offers beginners’ instruction or experts’ refreshment. (May)