This page was intended to be a few links to supplement to my classes on Patchwork and Embroidery Techniques for Crazy Quilting, but as usual it blew up into an extensive list. If you have questions or suggestions, please comment on the blog post about this page or fill out the contact form. Thanks!
Offline, I have two books by J. Marsha Michler: The Magic of Crazy Quilting and Crazy Quilting – The Complete Guide. It’s doubtful you need both, as there is a lot of overlap, but I can recommend getting some book by her that most suits your goals. You might also decide that what you really want is a book purely about embroidery.
History and Examples
The International Quilt Study Center & Museum has an online exhibition about crazy quilts, with lots of information as well as pictures.
The Caron Collection has a feature on the history of crazy quilts.
Rocky Mountain Quilts has a large gallery of crazy quilts.
Here’s a gorgeous antique quilt with extensive embroidery.
Design
The Art of Choosing is a long series by In Color Order on understanding color and choosing color schemes for quilts.
On Project Gutenberg you can read a Victorian book on the language of flowers (though you’ll have to look up images of the flowers that strike you).
A Google Image search for Victorian nature drawings could be inspiring.
Here are some ideas I had for themes that would be minimally anachronistic:
- Prairie (ornamental grasses, birds, insects)
- Coral Reef (coral, urchins, anemones, tropical fish)
- The Wind in the Willows (willows, cattails, rowboats, early 1900s motorcar, Mole, Rat, Badger, Toad)
- Alice in Wonderland (mushrooms, playing cards, roses, pocketwatch, bottles and cakes with “drink/eat me” labels, fans, hookah, disembodied grin, tea set, top hat, tarts)
- Jules Verne (prehistoric animals, hot air balloon, submarine and giant squid, bullet-shaped spaceship, message in a bottle)
Piecing
I explain confetti piecing in a longer post on making quilted potholders, and I have another example here.
Connecting Threads teaches stitch and flip two ways (edge to edge and center out).
It is possible to use patterns on crazy quilt blocks, and Pintangle has a whole lot of them. They’re given as blocks divided up into non-overlapping pieces, so be sure to add your own 1/4″ seam allowances when you cut your fabric.
You can make your own blocks for machine piecing with a square piece of paper and a ruler: mark lines from the outside in, so each new line runs into either a previous line or the edge of the paper at each end. If you’re using traditional piecing, there’s no restriction on straightness of lines or how the lines intersect; Allie in Stitches has an informative process post on making a block with a spiral-y shape.
You could also combine traditional patchwork quilting with crazy quilting, starting with a piece of a patchwork block and expanding it to full block size with traditional or machine crazy quilt piecing. This is a good way to get a clean pattern for a fan (see this one too), star (likewise), or pinwheel.
Embroidery
Pintangle has a tutorial on embroidering crazy quilt seams from which I took much inspiration; it is available for download as a PDF. In that post you’ll also find a downloadable lesson on 12 embroidery stitches for beginners.
I have two pages on embroidery in general, Learn Hand Embroidery and Ideas and Inspiration. The former includes links to stitch dictionaries and beginning embroidery tutorials, and the latter is more about design, creativity, and specific embroidery subtopics.
Here are some alternative directions for stitches in your handout: blanket (buttonhole) stitch and relatives (includes feather), Cretan stitch, fly stitch and relatives, running stitch and relatives, satin stitch and long and short satin stitch, stem stitch.
Some fun with a stitch in your handout: fly stitch hearts!
Links to instructions for the “suggested stitches to learn next” (aside from additional variations of the stitches above): French knot and bullion knot, chain stitch and relatives, herringbone and chevron.
For patterns for your embroidered motifs, Embroidery Pattern Central is a great index of free embroidery patterns around the web (despite being encrusted with ads).
Projects
Marsha Michler suggests making small projects like potholders when you are learning a new crazy quilting technique, and I’ve taken that to heart (that post is a tutorial). However, there are many more small projects you can make that don’t have the restrictions potholders do (you aren’t going to use velvet and satin on a potholder!).
A scissors holder would be an apropos first project. Like a potholder, it’s small – just one 5″ square, plus a plain one for lining.
In the sewing accessories theme, Pintangle is holding a hussif mini-challenge. A hussif is a sewing caddy with pockets and pouches that folds or rolls up for travel. You can see Sharon’s hussif take shape in the posts in the mini-challenge category.
A purse or clutch would be another idea on a similar scale to the hussif.
You can also try working at a smaller scale, and make an ornament or pendant, or the cover for a needle book. This can be easier in one way since there is less area to cover, but harder in another because you have to scale everything down in order to fit enough in to make it look like a crazy quilt.
But of course the holy grail would be a full quilt. How do you complete such a thing? Pintangle has tips for managing large projects, where by “large” she means long-term as well as physically big. You could also start with something like a table runner or wall hanging, which would be constructed in the same way but be smaller.
If you are making a quilt and using confetti pieced blocks, add a foundation layer to them before embroidering them. That will help support the weight and is used in one of the backing methods.
Step 1 is to attach your blocks together. Pintangle has a post about that as well. You might want to sash them (put strips of fabric between) instead of attaching them directly together; see Allie’s in Stitches for a tutorial on that technique.
You may want to add a border as Step 2. That frames your work. For Dummies has a nice straightforward how to, and Quiltville has a discussion with tips, tricks, and warnings.
Step 3 for many crazy quilters is to add a backing that will be hidden within the quilt. This fabric is thoroughly stitched to the backings of each crazy quilt square, without stitching through to the front of the quilt, so that the whole (heavy) thing is supported without covering the outer quilt back with big stitches. CQMagOnline has an article on this, and the author has additional pictures on her own blog. As an alternative you can stitch all the way through to the front of the quilt but hide the stitches within beads or buttons, as Pintangle demonstrates (this post has a photo of the finished backside stitching). You may or may not want a layer of thin batting between the false back and the quilt top; the bumpier the top the more important batting can be to help everything lie smoothly.
Note that some quilters call the hidden backing the “false back” and the one that shows “decorative,” and others call the hidden on simply the “backing” and the one that shows “false.” Just a warning for when you go to find other resources to answer any questions these leave you with.
Step 4, then, is to add the back that will show. The decorative back is often tied instead of quilted on (though of course you could quilt it, stitching in the seamlines between squares or making decorative quilting down the sashing if you used it), and in fact the ties may be on the back side so as not to interrupt the front. Connecting Threads has a nice tutorial on tying quilts. Instead of literally tying, you can also just tack the quilt layers together periodically with stitching. This is often done with a bead or button on one or both sides of the quilt. On Pintangle you’ll see both sides decorated that way, and on Allie’s in Stitches just the back, with buttons. The front stitches are just placed in unobtrusive locations.
Lastly, you have to finish the edges. You can bind them as in patchwork quilting (see McCall’s Quilting for a tutorial series), but there are other options. The sequel to the previous CQMagOnline article discusses French facing, which doesn’t add an additional “frame” to the front of the quilt.