Unconventional Materials

Wedding Dress Binding by Wise Craft Handmade

Binding made from fabric cut from a wedding dress.

Crazy Square by Wise Craft Handmade

Crazy pieced square, vintage silks taken from coat linings.

I make mistakes all day long to get to the best way to do something. All the hard math, messed up fabric, broken needles, and somehow, I figure out how to make it work.
Most of the time, anyway.
For the quilts I am making for the book, there is a slew of unconventional materials for me to work with. Some of them I’ve got some experience with, but there’s some that I don’t. Above are images of some of the things coming from my studio these days. (#wisecraftquilts). That’s where the fun of it all comes in for me. To play around with weird-to-quilt-with fabrics- finesse and coax it into doing what I need it to do (like ski parkas). It’s usually a triumphant YES! heard from the studio when things start working right. And you know what? I’m convinced I need these regular “Aha!” moments in my life like these.
My desire is to share all that I know in this book about working with this unconventional fabrics, so that you, the reader, won’t have to be put off working with them yourself. I hope to stretch your thinking by showing you the possibilities of certain fabrics and techniques, so that you’ll not only want to make the projects, but put your own twist on them, make them uniquely yours.
When this manuscript is turned in mid-November, I will no longer be all book all the time. In fact I am looking forward to opening up that “New Projects” file on my computer and getting going on the Aha! ideas I only ever seem to have when I don’t actually have the time to do them.

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