Making Connections: A Free-Motion Quilting Workbook

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A quick rundown of this product’s key features:

Quilt with fewer starts and stops! Streamline your free-motion quilting with this workbook full of exercises to build your skills. Easy-to-follow, step-by-step illustrations for each design suite show how to adapt the quilting design for blocks, borders, sashing, and allover quilting. Practice each design with a pencil on the included practice pages before stitching by machine, then put your skills to the test on a gorgeous pieced sampler project. These creative continuous-line quilting designs can be used on both longarm and domestic machines. • Learn from an award-winning longarm machine quilter • Combine 12 free-motion motifs for limitless possibilities, including curves, curls, leaves, spikes, waves, and loops • Fill in four-grid blocks, triangles, borders, and more with these deceptively simple designs

Our Top Reviews

Reviewer: SLS
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Great Logical Approach For Beginners; 1 Quilt Project Included
Review: 2 basic questions come to mind when considering Dorie Hruska’s Making Connections – A Free-Motion Quilting Workbook. How is it different from all the other free-motion quilting books? Is it really applicable to both long- and short-armers?~~~ How is it different from all the other free-motion quilting books?Making Connections is workbook-driven. There are incremental steps with examples, drawings, and practice grids. Quilting lines are color-coded line. The main gist of this method by Dorie Hruska is 1 quilting line gets done first, then a 2nd line overlays and/or complements the 1st, etc.The key behind the theory is to work continuously, clockwise, and stop where your started the design. This unlocks the bind many quilters get locked into, and allows intersections and connections that give depth and character to the quilting. It also allows an “easy in” and an “easy out”, plus you can easily break-away into the field of an area with your favorite motifs.The book is presented in landscape orientation. It makes it very awkward to work with, although the intention was probably to accommodate the charts and grids and make this seem like a workbook. I personally wish it could have remained mostly portrait, with only certain pages in landscape.There is only 1 quilt – “Sunshine and Lemon Drops” (50”x50”), as seen on the cover – used throughout the book. This keeps things simple for the earnest beginner. But it’s a bit dull for those of us who love gallery sections, or are more advanced machine quilters. Making Connections lacks that certain zip and wow we love in the books we choose to purchase. However, this all comes out of necessity, as the inspiration comes from the methodology and not the eye candy. Complete instructions are included for piecing and assembling “Sunshine and Lemon Drops”.1 of the stated objectives of the book is to limit or eliminate stitching in the ditch as a stabilizing method. Yet curiously, when it comes time to put it all together, the author’s very first words are to ditch-stitch BEFORE free-motion stitching. It’s done in an “as you go” fashion, but ultimately, practically the entire quilt will be ditch-stitched.~~~ Does it fulfill its promise (as stated in its 2nd subtitle) to apply equally to both long-arm and domestic machines?Making Connections is ideal for beginning long-arm quilters. It most certainly can help develop the eye-arm-muscle coordination and memory needed to acquire long-arm skills. But short-arm domestic machine quilters also have to coordinate movement of the quilt sandwich, which can be quite cumbersome with larger quilts.It takes more short-arm experience to do broad sweeps of quilting lines while managing synch and flow. To quilt the finer, more limited areas (such as within blocks or block pieces), requires a short-armer to pool and bunch the sandwich. Sounds so simple until you’ve developed the technique in such a way that does not compromise the stability of the quilt in other areas.So, ironically, the book might appeal more to beginner long-armers and experienced short-armers. This will become clear, I believe, when the quilter attempts to extrapolate the techniques used on the 1 quilt in Making Connections to other projects.~~~ Finally, a few observations.Back to that ditch-stitching issue. On a domestic machine, this is most easily and consistently done using a walking foot. If this is the case for you, then you have to factor in foot changes, which is counter to the author’s intention of interruption-free continuous line quilting.The author does do a soft sell marketing blurb for her own line of stencils. These are diagonal square grid stencils in different widths. They can be useful for marking borders for quilting. Vinyl overlays are suggested for other quilting lines. So, despite the author’s stated objectives to use fewer tools (such as rulers) and quilt quickly, time and materials (yes, including rulers) are still needed for marking.Despite these few internal inconsistencies, Making Connections is a valuable book to add to your free-motion library. It appeals to both sides of the quilter’s brain: photographs rich in visual detail are accompanied by verbal text dialogues (“over leaf over down”). These are 2 vital ways to develop successful free-motion quilting, skill which is both multi-tasking AND multi-sensory.Dorie Hruska accomplishes this in spades in Making Connections. And curls, and loops, and feathers, and …

Reviewer: Sandra
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Useful Book
Review: Very nice. I like the ideas and how it shows in what order to quilt the lines and that it gives you a practice page. Glad I bought it. I’ve already tried some of these. I am always working on machine quilting on my home machine and am planning to eventually get a mid or longarm. However, if I wait long enough, I won’t need the mid or long arm as I’ll have gotten better on my home machine. I like the format, focusing on one thing at a time. Works for me.

Reviewer: Pamisuej
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Quilting on a grid
Review: Many how-to-quilt-it designs using a grid. Great illustrations. Also includes blank grids to practice on paper before quilting with sewing machine. The book is printed ‘landscape’ which took me a while to get used to. I think this book would be easier to use if it was spiral bound.

Reviewer: Jonese Bostian
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Love this book and technique!
Review: I make quilts with lots of pieces, mostly Bonnie Hunter patterns and longarm them using techniques Dorie shares in her books. Highly recommend this for new longarm quilters working at developing a freehand quilting style.

Reviewer: Teri Smith
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: This is a good book, but frankly it wasn’t until I watched …
Review: This is a good book, but frankly it wasn’t until I watched some of Dorie’s YouTube videos that things clicked for me. Now it is good references/idea book.

Reviewer: Susan B. Leavitt
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Step by step instructions : excellent
Review: After taking a workshop with Dorie, I wanted to have something that would give me directions to help in creating patterns over a grid in my quilts. This book is clearly laid out and has excellent diagrams and illustrations.

Reviewer: K Meyer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: I am a visual person – pictures and instructi9ns are great!
Review: Lots of pictures and instructions on how to expand your quilting by machine.

Reviewer: Bonnie L.
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Really helpful book!
Review: Great ideas you can always come back to when long arm quilting.

Reviewer: cremedwheat
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Love it!

Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: very informative

Reviewer: Cristina
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I would recommend this book to anybody who wants to give a custom quilted book to their quilts but without spending countless hours quilting it

Reviewer: WesternWilson
Rating: 1.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I was really drawn to the description of this book, which indicated some direction would be given on planning out how to approach quilting up quilt tops. And while the idea of working designs edge-to-edge with no need to stop, tie off and bury/snip ends is a good one, it is really the only one in this book. The rest of the book is a series of exercises showing the way she stitches some simple and dated designs. There is little “meat” to the text, so for the money I would go with one of the more extensive quilting books out there, ie. by Angela Walters. I was also annoyed by the way they printed this book: the pages are set landscape style, which would have suited a coil bound format, but this is bound the usual way, so it is a pain to hold it sideways to read. I am still looking for a book with a deep discussion of how to approach and choose quilting designs for tops, how to quilt with few stops and starts, etc. if anyone has a recommendation!

Price effective as of Mar 20, 2025 01:29:16 UTC

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