From the Publisher
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."

This one is going out on a ring for all those quilting bookcrossers : )

name (lives/shipping preferences) not in order yet

Gorydetails(NH/international)
Zmrzlina (Mass/anywhere)
Sugarcane (DC/international)
Drommie 1810(Va/North America)
BunRab(TX/North America)
juliebarreto(HI/anywhere)
NancyJo(SD/US)
Iduggan1(Ca/N.America)
nwpassage(Canada/anywhere)
symphonicca (Canada/international)

"That Dorky Homemade Look" arrived safely in today's mail, and looks like a lot of fun! [I'm not a quilter myself, but the principles on the cover are funny anyway, and many of the concepts would seem to translate very well to other do-it-yourself endeavors...]

This was very entertaining - sort of Dave-Barry-esque in style, and quite funny. While there were some bits that I suspect only quilters would get, most of it was perfectly applicable to my own crafts-and-hobbies experiences, and I really enjoyed the trip. There's the chapter on "Fear of Florals" [with some hilarious suggestions as to the deeper meaning of one's preferences in colors and patterns], "The Genetics of Quilting Tools" [in which the concept of "the good scissors" is raised - I recall being baffled as a child by my mother's insistence that I not use the Good Scissors to cut up cardboard boxes, but of course now I have Good Scissors of my own!], "The Zen of Seam Ripping" [I haven't ripped seams in decades but this chapter brought it all back], and many more...

Favorite quote:

...because each of us is unique, each quilt is beautifully and wondrously different. It's as if our souls were laid open and squashed down into every color and fiber of the thing. A quilt is a song, a dance, a soft soothing poem, or a tumultuous scream of panic. (Okay, maybe I am the only one who has ever made a tumultuous scream of panic quilt, but you get the idea.)

And even if your only connection with quilting is those quilted-toilet-paper ads on TV, there's something for you here!

Thanks for sending this one around, KAT123. I'll be putting the book in the mail to Zmrzlina today...

P.S. The book came with a selection of handmade (but not dorky!) BookCrossing bookmarks; I've taken one and will send the rest along with the book.

This looks like the perfect Sunday afternoon read, and that is what I will do tomorrow. I'll post a proper journal entry after I've read it. And I like the bookmarks!

Ah ha! This book proves we BookCrossers are not addicted to books. We are victims of the same phenomenon that causes quilters to buy more fabric than they can ever use, a sort of feeding frenzy. Book-reading frenzy. We can't help ourselves. It is in our nature :-)

I enjoyed this book. I'm not a quilter, but I found the "dance like nobody's watching" philosophy Boyer lives (though I guess it would be "quilt like nobody's noticing") fits any passion. I thought there was just a bit too many husband anecdotes, but I did like the chapter where Boyer manages to deflect future "what are you going to do with that" questions by making sure her husband has a passion of his own. I don't think it is necessary to have to justify one's passion, but if you can manage to encourage another person's, go for it.

Thank you KAT123. I will be sending this off to Sugarcane as soon as I have her address.

This just came in from zmrzlina. I can't wait to read it. I'd call myself a lapsed wannabe quilter. Maybe this book will give me the push I need.

The package included some slick bookmarks. They don't really fit the theme though: they don't look dorky or homemade at all!

Lisa Boyer really is the Erma Bombeck of quilting. Here's one of my favorite parts, about her secret fear of Sunbonnet Sue:

"Sure, I know she probably looks innocent to you, but think about it. What is she hiding behind that hat? What if she has a giant, green, convoluted, alien head with red glowing eyeballs and a blood-sucking tentacle mouth? And haven't you noticed that she is hardly ever alone? She's usually appliqued onto a quilt along with her other bonneted alien-head friends, doing something wholesome like pretending to pick flowers or playing patty-cake. And there they are... watching you from your bed... waiting for you to go to sleep... ssleeeeeeep..."

Best of all, this book made me want to dig up my dormant quilting projects and start them up again. Thanks a lot, Lisa Boyer.

Will send this to drommie1810 as soon as I get her address.

I'm terribly sorry for the delay in sending this out. I've had Drommie1810's address for a while now. My only excuse is that for two weeks I was on deadline at work, then out of town, then sick in bed. I've got the book packaged up and I'll send it out today if I can get to the 24-hour postage machine, otherwise Monday at the latest. So sorry.

Update 4/19: sent out Monday

Received from the BXer formerly known as Sugarkane...

I saw this at the MidAtlantic Quilt Festival this past February, but had already spent all my money on fabric (of course). Can't wait to read this in it's entirety. The only thing I remember from leafing through it was the part where Boyer explains that her mother having "good scissors" made her think that, on some level, all the other scissors must be evil. But that was enough to make me want to read it all.

I'll probably knock this one out during lunch breaks...it seems like a quick read.

Good wacky quilting fun. I can see where some of the non-quilters may have missed certain inside jokes (like the strange preoccupation with points we all seem to have), but I think most of it is funny either way. My favorite part is still the one about good versus evil scissors, though the plea of the ugly fabric is a close second. I've given into that a few times myself.

Thanks to KAT123 for making this available! I'll pass it on as soon as I have BunRab's address.

Looks like a quick read - I'll try and do it by the end of the week.

whoops, that was me, didn't realize I wasn't logged in

Anyhoo. Pretty funny. I've thought most of those things at one point or another...

True story about husbands and crafts: I do cross-stitch and needlepoint, using cotton floss, as well as quilting and weaving and all that. So Spousal Unit is fairly used to assorted needlework STUFF all over the house, and has even absorbed some of the terminology. We bought a CD one day and when he opened the jewel box, the CD inside was, instead of the usual silver, a very bright purple. He blinked at it and asked, "What DMC number is *that*??"

On to the next person.

Released on Monday, June 28, 2004 at Post Office in By Post, By Post Controlled Releases.

mail to next person in ring

It arrived today, with a very dorky homemade bookmark! Thanks!

There are some hilarious essays in here. My 11 year old and I were gut-laughing at it just this morning. Interesting to note she's just an island or two away.

Sending it off to the next in line.

Received in the mail yesterday. Looks like it will be a fun read.

It's here! Looks really fun. I will start it right away, and I'd better PM the next person in line, since I don't think it will take me very long. :)

I finished this the same day it arrived. My boyfriend and I went on a long car trip that evening and I read bits and pieces out loud to him. The tale of Boyer's "most perfect chicken" in the story/chapter "My Next Quilt" had us both laughing so hard we were in tears. All in all, a very cute book, accessible to us non-quilters (though I'm sure there were a few nuances we didn't get). Thanks so much for sharing this with us, KAT123!

After some deliberation, the next bookcrosser on the list (symphonicca) decided to decline the book. Since joining, she has moved to Austria and was deterred by the high cost of postage.

I will be sending this book home to KAT123; it will be mailed on my next errand day: Thursday, November 4.

home safe and sound hope everyone enjoyed it as much as i did