Lynette Jensen

Thimbleberries Quilt books are always beautiful and collector's items. This is a gorgeous book of quilts, bed quilts, wallhangings, table runners, placemats, and more. This book is full of just beautiful quilts. Patchwork quilts, Applique quilts, and more. This book even has a special section for each quilt called 'color play'. What that is is they show you the same quilt in different colors, sometimes up to 3 different colored quilts. That is a really nice feature as sometimes it is hard to show more imagine a quilt in different colors other than the ones that are shown. For instance, some quilts are shown in light color, and the color play comes in with the same quilt in darker colors. I love that they do this. It gives you more ideas, more colors to choose from. They take the work out of changing colors of the quilts for you. I will admit from experience, you cannot make these quilts in 'one' weekend. In particularly, the applique quilts, and the bed quilts. The more details in the quilts, the longer it takes to make them. Perhaps some of them you can make the top in a weekend, but others need a few weekends. I think the point of this book is not to make a quilt in 'one' weekend, but maybe over two or three weekends. All in all, I LOVE this book! It has been, and will stay in my library forever. This is the kind of book you go back and look at over and over because all the quilts are so beautiful. Also, you have every intention of making every quilt in this book! I highly recommend it to quilters who love quilting. show less

This was an interesting book with many beautiful quilt patterns. The instructions were well-written, but the pictures were what made the patterns perfectly clear. I love how Jensen put the final measurements after each step in the process. This makes sure your block is on track. Jensen also recommended how to quilt each piece so you didn't have to try and figure out what to do.

The Big Book of Quilt Blocks is an instruction manual for creating five different quilts from Thimbleberries popular Block-of-the-Month series. As suggested by the series title, each qult is composed of twelve blocks, thus reducing the daunting task of producing a full-size quilt into twelve bite-size pieces. I picked up the book at a sale and would likely never have purchased it for full price -- or even if I had had the time to examine it closely. The somber colors throughout the book show more quite likely influence my less-than-enthusiastic reaction. The complete, easy-to-understand directions are in large print (hallelujah!). In addition to the usual color diagram, each quilt design also features a one-inch square photograph of each required fabrics. All in all, this is a quite nice instructional book. This would make a very nice first quilting book. As well, it adds sixty block designs to your quilt-block catalog. Though the designs don't interest me at present, I'm awarding it four stars based on how nicely (and completely) it presents instructions for the featured traditional designs. show less

I've done two quilts out of this book so far and have found that the instructions are clear. The patterns I've done look complicated, but have been easy. I don't like the stylized flowers and fruit, but the 'north woods' look is great. I finished both the blocks and the border for Paddlewheels and Pinwheels (a windmill pattern), from first cut to finish in a weekend (I quilted it section by section).