Following on from Elizabeth Barton's last book Inspired to Design: Seven Steps to Successful Art Quilts, this book looks at moving your work forward and considers working in a series. The previous book focused on elements of design for art quilts in order to demystify a subject that often causes terror for people who don't know where to start. In that book, there was a lot of useful advice on how to approach a design, from inspiration to creating a visual structure through line, grids and letters and then evaluating your work objectively. This book moves on from that and tackles the subject of how to start looking at creating work in a series. Split into five sections, each covering a specific area, the start of the book is a very useful exercise in planning your series work as it maps out the reasons and benefits of this kind of approach. From developing your own style to exploring an idea more thoroughly, some interesting points are raised. The age-old problem of people feeling they cannot draw is one that is worked around and you don't feel that this is the be-all and end-all of planning art quilts, whether in a series or not. I liked Elizabeth Barton's approach to this subject. She suggests you go back to your previous work and look for common themes, or areas of interest that come up, and how your work is organised visually. From that, the next step is to find a theme for your series, which may come from an object or fabric texture and consider how that fits in with what you want to achieve. The chapters flow into each other and the aim is for the work to evolve in the same way. There is an interesting section on using photo editing software to manipulate your images to create a range of different visuals without altering the cohesiveness of your series. There are a huge number of photographs of art quilts, from the author and other quilters that show their work in this sphere. Different quilts in each series are examined, so that you see what choices were made to change elements of the quilts but retain the identity of the series. This is a really interesting book and offers good guidance for those who want to explore how to work with a larger range but have a common thread running throughout. Samantha Packer-Workshop On The Web
