by Kathleen Barkley
Lovely LANDSCAPE QUILTS
USING STRINGS & SCRAPS TO PIECE
AND APPLIQUE SCENIC QUILTS
By Cathy Geier
Publisher: Fons & Porter
Cincinnati, Ohio
$24.99
Cathy Geier is an author, teacher, and lecturer in addition to an award-winning quilter. Geier specializes in landscape quilts and her quilts have been juried into national shows, won national and regional ribbons and have been featured in American Quilter, Quilter’s Newsletter, Quilt World and Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting. She is the author of several articles and a book, Watercolor Landscape Quilts. Geier owns and manages an online quilt shop, Patchworks that Praise, that specializes in fabrics for landscape quilting. She also invented and patented a piecing technique using a tear-away foundation. This technique enables quilters to sew together multiple squares and half square triangles quickly, easily, and accurately.
Chapter 1 features a variety of strip-pieced landscapes from contributing artists. All of the quilts in this chapter are made using strips of fabric. What I found especially interesting about this chapter was the biography that was included with each artist. Few had backgrounds in the visual arts. Canadian, English, American, & a Netherland artist are featured.
Included in the chapters is design layout, pieced and non-pieced landscapes, using a tear-away foundation, using fusible interfacing, string piecing, embellishments and appliqué, adding shading and highlights, and 15 projects. According to Geier, color and texture matter more than the type of fabric and she frequently mixes all kinds of fabric.
If you are new to using strings and scraps to piece and want to make a landscape quilt, this book is a good starting point with great color photographs on a variety of projects. You will learn how to use angles to create skies, hills, water, and mountains. You will also learn how to create shadows and highlights to give your landscape quilts depth and perspective.
Happy Quilting!
