Quilts! Quilts!! Quilts!!! by Diana McClun and Laura Downes was the first craft book I ever purchased. It was the early ‘90s and I was in my early twenties wanting to learn how to make a quilt. I could sew but I didn’t know anything about making a quilt.
I haven’t looked at this book in awhile. In fact, I did a book purge a few years back when I was moving to a smaller house and this ’90’s quilt book was spared. For purely sentimental reasons, I held onto it. But now looking through it, the quilt patterns are classics and I could see myself making them.
A little story telling here-there’s a bookmark in the Quilts! Quilts!! Quilts!!! book from A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books. It lists three locations in the Bay Area and I’m not sure which one I got the book from. It looks like all three are closed now…I lived in San Francisco for about 8 years back in the 80’s/90’s. My college boyfriend and I would get pizza on a Friday night and then hit up one of the many bookstores that were open late. It’s one of those traditions that lived on even though we moved to Oregon and had a family.
There were so many good bookstore spots in San Francisco, old dusty disorganized places crammed with books and shiny new chain bookstores like Brentano’s and Barnes and Noble. Clement Street had Green Apple and a few others(Green Apple is still around). Down in North Beach, City Lights still stands. City Lights was founded by a poet and frequented by “beatniks” in its early years in the 1950’s. Parking was impossible and it took multiple bus transfers to get to City Lights, so that was a bookstore I only went to a few times. Later, a Brentano’s opened near where we lived but I believe by the time we left for Oregon, it had turned into a Barnes and Noble. There were still others, small places that I can’t remember names and probably don’t exist anymore.
I read and flipped through the pages of Quilts! Quilts!! Quilts!!!(yes, the title is a lil fun and quirky!) many times. I was trying to figure out the instructions and all the steps of making a quilt. I would pick one and then change my mind about making it. Finally, I chose the Fence Rail pattern and picked out my(mostly hideous) fabric. Well….it was not good. I finished the quilt and I still have it stuffed in a bag somewhere. My fabric choices were not great together, my sewing even worse and I cut everything by hand with scissors instead of a ruler and rotary cutter. After that, I still flipped through the book often and made other quilts that were something I could be proud of.
The point of all this is that Craft Books are not a one and done read. There is so much value in these types of books: beautiful inspiring photos and instructions on how to make your own version of what inspired you in the first place.
Now I’m off to flip through the rest of my collection of 1990’s quilt books.
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