Smashing Sets: Exciting Ways to Arrange Quilt Blocks

This volume offers a new perspective for settings using traditional quilt blocks. It features ideas for combining simple but unexpected designs, easy piecing, and fabric knowledge. Only straight-line piecing is used. There are 36 quilts, with layouts for making 16 of them, step-by-step instructions and advice on fabric choices, plus sample layouts to play with.

Once you've put lots of time and effort into piecing traditional quilt blocks, you can assemble them in the traditional way--or you can take a more adventurous approach for a change of pace. Margaret J. Miller's Smashing Sets: Exciting Ways to Arrange Quilt Blocks offers lovely color photos of about three dozen innovative quilts, derived from an assortment of conventional blocks. But that's where tradition gets left behind: accented with unexpected fabrics and assembled in surprising arrangements, these blocks come together in exciting quilts. The complex designs belie the fact that they are relatively easy to assemble, because they all employ only straight-line piecing. Good directions and extensive diagrams explain the piecing process and demystify template-making. Gridded drawings of 16 of the book's featured quilts, accompanied by design and piecing notes, allow readers to re-create some of Miller's imaginative designs, and her advice on fabric choices, design principles, and pattern variations helps quilters to develop their own "smashing sets." --Amy Handy