The Quilters Catalog: A Comprehensive Resource Guide

It’s not your grandmother’s quilt world anymore. Quilting today is a phenomenally popular hobby, artform, and business, often rolled into one, that attracts 21 million avid quilters who spend $2.27 billion annually on their passion. There are 2,500 quilt shops around the country, popular television series, guilds, Web sites, and national fairs—one in Houston draws 50,000 visitors each year.

Meg Cox, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is one of the obsessive new quilters, and in The Quilter's Catalog, she draws on all her skills as a journalist to write the essential resource for contemporary quilters. Here’s the low-down on tools: computer-driven sewing machines, innovative rotary cutters, longarms. New and old techniques, from how to dye your own fabric to cutting-edge digital photo-transfer. Profiles of the twenty top quilting teachers— television’s Alex Anderson, Esterita Austin and her award-winning landscape quilts, Ruth McDowell, known for her bravura technique. Who makes the best fabrics and how to find them. A complete resource guide to the best Web sites, online groups, books, patterns, stores, shows, challenges. And a look at the new world of quiltaholics: its sense of community, its opportunities for business, its controversies (hand-sewn vs. machine-sewn), its attractions—quilting is easy, portable, friendly, therapeutic, often profitable, and the perfect way to mark a milestone.

The book includes 12 step-by-step projects from key teachers—a crib quilt, bed quilts, quilted ornaments—and instructions on how to hang, store, or ship a quilt.

Meg Cox was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal for seventeen years. She is the author of The Book of New Family Traditions and The Heart of a Family: Searching America for New Traditions. She is married, has one son, and lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where she belongs to the local quilting guild. Cox has been quilting for 20 years and is vice president of the nonprofit Alliance for American Quilts.