That Dorky Homemade Look: Quilting Lessons from a Parallel Universe

          Fed up with feeling like you can't meet the standards of the Quilt Police? Do you want to quilt for comfort and pleasure -- and not to win some high-falutin' quilting contest? Weary of worrying about what others will think of your color choices -- or your pieced points? Or your applique stitches? That Dorky Homemade Look: Quilting Lessons from a Parallel Universe is the quilting companion you've been wishing for.           Lisa Boyer, a popular columnist for Quilting Today magazine, gives you permission to quilt because you love it. She clears your path of all those merciless judgments pronounced by the Quilting Queens. She invites you to make quilts that are full of life. This funny book offers these nine principles for the 20 million quilters in America:           1. Pretty fabric is not acceptable. Go right back to the quilt shop and exchange it for something you feel sorry for.           2. Realize that patterns and templates are only someone's opinion and should be loosely translated. Personally, I've never thought much of a person who could only make a triangle with three sides.           3. When choosing a color plan for your quilt, keep in mind that the colors will fade after a hundred years or so. This being the case, you will need to start with really bright colors.           4. You should plan on cutting off about half your triangle or star points. Any more than that is showing off.           5. If you are doing applique, remember that bigger is dorkier. Flowers should be huge. Animals should possess really big eyes.           6. Throw away your seam ripper and repeat after me: "Oops. Oh, no one will notice."           7. Plan on running out of border fabric when you are three-quarters of the way finished. Complete the remaining border with something else you have a lot of, preferably in an unrelated color family.           8. You should be able to quilt equally well in all directions. I had to really work on this one. It was difficult to make my forward stitching look as bad as my backward stitching, but closing my eyes helped.           9. When you have put your last stitch in the binding, you are still only half finished. Your quilt must now undergo a thorough conditioning. Give it to someone you love dearly—to drag around the house, wrap up in, spill something on, and wash and dry until it is properly lumpy.           "No reason not to have quiltmaking be a pleasure", says Lisa Boyer, who has as firm a grip on her sense of humor as she does on her quilting needles. "If we didn't make Dorky Homemade quilts, all the quilts in the world would end up in the Beautiful Quilt Museum, untouched and intact. Quilts would just be something to look at. We would forget that quilts are lovable, touchable, shreddable, squeezable, chewable, and huggable -- made to wrap up in when the world seems to be falling down around us."

Lisa Boyer became a self-taught quilter at the age of eight, patching together a salesman’s book of bedspread swatches with her toy sewing machine. She only took a few years off as she earned her degree in microbiology, worked as a clinical laboratory scientist, then became a sewing-machine mechanic, pattern designer, quilt teacher, writer, magazine columnist, and mother. Her varied interests have led her to write articles on such diverse topics as quilting, hurricanes, vegetables, shoes, and sewing-machine repair, just to name a few. Known to her friends as “the mad quilt scientist,” Lisa combines her love of quilting with her background in science and psychology, resulting in some strangely unique philosophies. Her first book, That Dorky Homemade Look—Quilting Lessons from a Parallel Universe, was written as a tribute to all the lovely, but less-than-perfect, quilts and quilters everywhere. Lisa’s articles have appeared in Kauai Magazine and the Orange County Register, in addition to her regular column in Quiltworks Today Magazine. Lisa’s quilts have appeared in Quilting Today, Quiltworks Today, Miniature Quilts and Kauai magazines. She also made a guest appearance on HGTV’s “Simply Quilts.” Lisa Boyer is a native of southern California. She now lives in Hawaii on the island of Kauai with her husband, a clockmaker by avocation, and their son.