Fabricadabra: Simple Quilts, Complex Fabrics: Discover the Hidden Potential in Your Stash

By Paula Nadelstern

The author of Kaleidoscope Quilts shows how to use simple piecing to create spectacular quilts that are a feast for the eyes.

Imagine a traditional quilt, its ordinary shapes gift wrapped with intricate fabrics. Celebrated author, teacher, and fabric designer Paula Nadelstern shows you how to design simple but stunning quilts with the help of vivacious fabric prints. Analyze fabrics to uncover their piecing potential for color and symmetry. Make your own cutting templates and learn how to get the “seemingly seamless” look made famous by Paula’s kaleidoscopic quilts. Example piecing diagrams show just how easy it is to quilt a visual spectacle.

• Fabricadabra! Discover your fabric’s hidden potential and sew complex-looking quilts that are easy to piece with industry leader Paula Nadelstern

• Understand symmetry in fabrics and fool the eye with daring design strategies

• Fussy cut prints to perfection with self-drafted templates and camouflage seams for luminous effects

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781617451898

Book preview

Introduction

Me, Myself, and My Process

When you work in a series, the questions you ask yourself get more complex but the answers get simpler. I know this because I’ve been absorbed in a series of kaleidoscopic quilts since 1987. One of the unplanned perks of this kind of focus is sudden intuitive leaps of understanding—actual breakthroughs to new and deeper perspectives on problems you (sometimes) didn’t even realize needed to be resolved. It feels as if, out of the blue, effortlessly, you now know something essential that you did not know the second before. The feeling is both surprising and fulfilling because you intuitively understand that the new knowledge will forever be part of your arsenal of design strategies.

This book is the result of one of my internalized eurekas. I realized I could, in a word (rare for me), simplify. Take the complex quilts I’ve made and pare them down to their essential bones. Take traditional quilts and gift wrap their simple shapes with intricate fabric.

Quilts made of simple shapes can be transformed into visual spectacles that read as complex, thoughtful acts of creativity. The quilts showcased in this book may look difficult and complicated, but ultimately they are not when you know how to look for the seams. The text distills 30 years of quiltmaking into simple theories that explain my way of thinking about quiltmaking processes. Along with other design elements, you’ll explore the possibilities offered by intricate, charismatic textiles while I attempt to demystify the nature of symmetry.

Please understand that the quilts in these pages are simple, but that doesn’t necessarily make them easy. There’s a difference.

Simple: Easily understood or done

Easy: Not requiring much effort, work, or thought

Be patient. Don’t accept a solution if you don’t like it. If you don’t like it now, you won’t like it when the quilt is finished. It always takes longer than you’d expect to design something good. Designing goes forward and back and wanders around in all directions. You don’t always find yourself in a fun place. But ultimately, the act of creating is a satisfying, if sometimes laborious, process. (It’s no secret that I’m one of those who celebrates artwork created in as much time as it takes. But just because how long it takes doesn’t matter to me doesn’t mean you shouldn’t figure out how to get there faster.)

I’ve noticed that quilters at every skill level—myself included—think the only time they are truly productive is when they are physically at the sewing machine. But all kinds of time are necessary parts of the process: looking, musing, revising, tinkering, screwing up, constructing, and deconstructing.

Sometimes you just have to coax inspiration. Typically, when I am stuck I dive into piles of fabrics and grab the ones that trigger what-if questions. I try to quash preconceived notions of what goes with the choices I’ve made so far. Reevaluating your choices is an extension of the problem-solving skills you use every day. Hopefully the process does not involve a trip to the fridge.

Because—circling back to the narrative I started with—the takeaway is that breakthroughs are more mundane than the idea of a magical epiphany might suggest. It may be magical but it’s not magic. You have to put in the time. New insights come when the mind is primed. Rather than being spontaneous and unprompted, they follow a process of significant, even if unconscious, thought about a problem. It may be simple but it doesn’t come easy.

—Paula Lyman Nadelstern

Quilt Gallery

LUMINOSITY LINES, designed and pieced by Paula Nadelstern, quilted by Sue Nickels, 41˝ × 43˝, 2004

Quilt layout

Luminosity Lines is a slightly larger variation of Angular Momentum. In this quilt the strips are 1˝ throughout and cut randomly. There are sixteen strips per triangle. Organized into a graded ombré, the colors travel from the bright eye-catching center diagonally out to the four darker comers. The important allover quilted curlicues soften the accidental connections into a luscious field of stitches.

Functioning somewhat as a stylish sashing, the horizontal trio of ikat-like bands in the middle helps strategically slide the eye from the bright center outward. The effect continues identically and symmetrically in the purple and black borders.

I pressed the seams open, first from the back and then from the front.

ANGULAR MOMENTUM, designed and pieced by Paula Nadelstern, quilted by Elizabeth Rosenberg, 36˝ × 36½˝, 2015

The ¼˝ strips of stained-glass fabric adjoining each long horizontal silk strip in the middle add a feisty twinkle, but their initial purpose was to function like a girdle, stabilizing the wonky silk. This fabric also appears on all four sides, just inside the wide border.

Left triangle

Right triangle

Quilt layout

Tangles fabric

Hand-marbled silk by Cosette Russell of Austin, Texas

I saved this fabulously zany marbled silk by Cosette Russel of Austin, Texas, for years, visiting it often. Since this flowing textile acts slinky even when interfaced with a fusible stabilizer, it needed to be cut into simple shapes and bordered with stable on-grain cottons to act as coping strips for trueing up.

To make the quilt, I made a full-size diagram of one quadrant on graph paper. Each quadrant is made from two identical triangles, one left and one right, each composed of thirteen 1˝ strips. The exceptions are the middle horizontal and vertical strips, which are 2˝, and the ¼˝ strips of stained-glass fabric adjoining each long horizontal silk strip in the middle and around all four of the quilt’s edges. The key to constructing this type of quilt is to strip on one band at a time and use full-size tracing-paper templates with seam allowances to attain the correct shape and size.

I sliced the silk randomly, assuming it would reconnect to itself in serendipitously odd but interesting links. All the added-on silk strips were cut wider and longer than needed to compensate for their unavoidably wonky qualities (including shrinkage when pressed) and then trimmed to the correct size using the tracing-paper templates. I fussy cut the alternating bands using five colorways of a pattern called Tangles to create a graded effect that moves the eye from the lighter corners in toward the darker centers.

Each of these pieced bands was cut with a template, four times to the left and then four more times with the template flipped over to the right to create its mirror image.

In case you were wondering, angular momentum is a term used in both physics and horology (the study of measuring time). Momentum is the force that allows something to continue moving or to grow stronger or faster as time passes; angular refers to moving in a circle—as in orbiting or rotating. In horology, the term refers to watches using a revolving disk system to represent the hours. I only know this because my husband is a watch geek, and as soon as I write this I will probably forget it.

AN AGREEMENT OF BUTTERFLIES, designed and pieced by Paula Nadelstern,