Follow-the-Line Quilting Designs: Volume 5 by Mary M. Covey

Follow-the-Line Quilting Designs: Volume 5
By Mary M. Covey
Gifted by Martingale & Company
www.martingale-pub.com
Reviewed by Jessica Nichols, Editor of FaveQuilts.com

Follow-the-Line Quilting Designs by Mary M. Covey is an incredibly useful series of quilting design kits that provide quilters with traceable quilting patterns. Volume 5: Authentic Civil War Designs and More includes traditional American quilting motifs, such as eagles, Baptist fans, pumpkin vines, clamshells, and more. The kit comes with an instruction booklet and 18 reusable quilting pattern sets, including designs for borders, blocks, and more.

Using the instruction booklet in Follow-the-Line Quilting Designs, you can learn how to use the 18 quilting motifs to mark a quilting design on a quilt. With light fabrics, you should be able to set the pattern behind the fabric and trace the motif. For darker fabrics, quilters are directed to use a lightbox to trace the designs. If you have already basted the quilt or you are working with very dark fabrics, you can also trace the motifs onto tracing paper, quilt right through the tracing paper, and then rip it off after quilting. All three methods are described in detail in the instruction booklet, so you won't be left scratching your head about how to use these patterns. The instruction booklet also includes tips on positioning and resizing the designs, so you can adapt them to any size quilt.

Each pattern set included in Follow-the-Line Quilting Designs is made up of a specific quilting motif adapted for a few different areas of your quilt. For example, the Swag pattern set includes a pattern for a section of a 5-1/2" border, a corner design for a 5-1/2" border, and a coordinating design for a 4" x 10" area of the center of the quilt. These patterns can easily be resized in a copier to create templates for different sized borders and blocks. Each pattern is also drawn for continuous line quilting so that you can line up sections of the pattern end to end to repeat across your quilt.

Volume 5: Authentic Civil War Designs and More includes 19th century quilting motifs that were originally designed to hold together batting, backing, and quilt top more efficiently than many modern quilting designs. The patterns replicate the quilting designs that were most popular during the Civil War era. Patriot star flowers and hanging diamonds are featured, as well as a stylized alphabet that can be used to spell out anything you like on the quilt.