Although I can rarely follow a pattern and often wing it with my quilt designs I’ve never really moved beyond fabric as a quilting medium, it’s just not something I’ve ever been drawn to try. But the Uncommon Quilter is all about using different mediums to create really striking small art quilts, incorporating plastics, paper, paint, and even things like dryer lint (trust me it looks better than you think it would).

The book provides you with 52 different patterns for small art quilts, one for each week of a year. The author, Jeanne Williamson, made a quilt a week for seven years (!), all from found objects, in order to push herself to explore new techniques and exercise her creativity in a systematic way. The book can be used in two different ways, both equally valuable. You could either use it as a guide to actually create the quilts as pictured, particularly if you feel like you need a little more structure to get started. Or, you could use the techniques, which are outlined in a step-by-step format, to create your own variations and interpretations of the designs presented. Either way, the book provides lots of interesting ideas and inspiration and even just as a catalogue of some of Williamson’s beautiful quilts, it’s a lovely read.