Michele Muska

The thoughtfulness and skill of the quilters who contributed to Muska's book is very evident, and the diagrams and instructions to construct each of the quilts or blocks are clear and easy to follow. However, I'm not sure the insides of the book quite live up to the promise of the title.

Ten quilt designs or blocks are featured: there are putative "traditional" and "modern" versions created for the book, as well as photographs of one or more vintage quilts of the same type that served as inspiration. However, I was disappointed that not all of the "traditional" designs seem particularly traditional, and there isn't much explanation for what a traditional quilt looked like or why design choices move a quilt from one category to another. For example, while the modern Flying Geese quilt uses a lot of white space and distills the design to the individual triangle shapes, common indicators of a modern design, the traditional one uses a modern color palette and a lot of white space. While the layout looks like other vintage Flying Geese quilts I've seen, it doesn't look like the inspiration vintage quilt, and there is no explanation for what the traditional quilts looked like.

The other quilts aren't quite so modern for the traditional entry (though the Yo-Yo quilt is very modern, too), but the problem of not explaining more about the inspirations or why choices were made can be applied for them, too. This was disappointing to me. The modern Dresden Plate is interesting, but why choose to slice each triangle into parts, rather than playing with the circular pattern, which is what reads "dresden plate" to me. The Crazy Quilts are very similar, and I couldn't identify what makes one traditional or modern.

The best examples of traditional vs modern are the Log Cabin and Hexagon quilts. They very closely resemble traditional quilts (the Hexagon is a direct copy of one from the 1800s!) with drastically different modern versions. The Bear Claw, 9 Patch, and Rail Fence are good efforts, but not quite as interesting to me.

On the whole, I don't think this is an awful book, but it might could have used a bit of better editing or guidance or a different theme. For the Traditional vs. Modern, I much prefer Vintage Quilt Revival, which details what choices can be made to modernize a traditional quilt block, and those choices can be applied to many of the blocks in the book - not just the ones used as technique examples.… (meer)