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by Joen Wolfrom

If you find yourself struggling with the essentials of good design, need a refresher, or simply want a good design reference book, take a look at Adventures in Design, The Ultimate Visual Guide – 153 Spectacular Quilts – Activities & Exercises. Opening the 142 page, full color book, is a beautiful journey down a creative path with Joen breaking down the principles of design, explaining the concepts, showing many examples of quilts and drawings to help illustrate those concepts, and providing activities and exercises to get you going.

This is a gorgeous and informative book.  While I am honored to have three quilts in this book, I do not exaggerate that everything about this book is first class, right down to the smooth, matte paper used on the cover which feels so good in your hands.  The content is broken down into three main sections: Setting the Visual Stage, eight ingredients for great design, which includes the power of design, line and direction, shape, color, value, texture, and visual finesse.  Section two is Creating the Visual Dance, a blueprint for superb design which includes ten stellar principles and info on visual balance.  The third section is Designing Spectacular Quilts, which merges everything prior to provide design strategies.

This is not a how to quilt book.  This is not a skim-the-surface of design book.  This is a serious design book presented in a beautiful and approachable format that inspires as it teaches. If you have any of Joen’s earlier books, such as Visual Dance: Creating Spectacular Quilts, The Magical Effects of Color, or Color Play (each of which are available as ebooks from Amazon), you’ll want to add this to the collection.  If you don’t have those books, the vast majority of quilt makers (and some other artists) will want this one.

It retails for $29.95.  If you don’t have a local quilt store in your area which you’d like to help support, you can get the book on Amazon at a discount.   If you’re on the fence about getting it, visit Amazon’s site where you’ll find a look inside feature will showcases several pages from the book.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 29th, 2011 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.