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Review: Adding Dimension to Your Quilts by Valda Newman

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A Workshop with Velda Newman: Adding Dimension to Your Quilts is a book setting out textile artist Valda Newman's techniques for adding dimension to a quilt, such as using stitching to create shape and texture, using fabric paint and watercolour pencils, or creating texture with cheesecloth. And it truly is a 'workshop' as the six studies (lemon, melon, basket, shell, tulip, and trout) set out exactly what to do step by step, listing the materials required, the cutting and stitching, the painting, and the finishing off.

Newman using shapes as the "building blocks of design". She breaks down every element of a design into a shape, so "a flower is nothing more than the sum of its petals, and a fish quickly becomes its components of body, head, fins, and tail." The challenge for the quilter is to give "a flat piece of fabric three-dimensional characteristics", which you do by relating the shapes to one another "in size, volume, perspective, and balance." Added to shape is texture, which appeals to "both sight and touch".

Work through the chapter setting out Newman's techniques for adding color, shape, and texture before tackling any of the studies, otherwise you'll find yourself referring back and forth, and miss the handy tips. These are: reverse machine appliqué (cutting away part of a fabric to reveal layers underneath it), tucks, shape and texture stitching, cheesecloth texture, paint, watercolour pencils, crayons, and pastels.

Tucks are used to make a shape look as if it were pieced together. If you're not convinced this'll work, you will be after you've tried the leaves exercise where tucks are used to create veins in a leaf. The photos showing the orange stitched in four different ways to create shape illustrate very clearly how effective this can be. Newman uses cheesecloth to add texture by layering it, cutting it, or pulling some of the treads, and painting it.

Paint is an important part of her work, used to create illusion, such as basket weave. There are precise instructions for how to paint each study, including how thin to make the paint (for example "mix one part raw sienna paint to four parts water"). The petals of a tulip are painted on one side, to give a variation in colour, rather than pieced. By allowing the colour to bleed into the fabric you get a lovely soft edge to it. A hairdryer can be used to speed up the drying of the paint, so you can get on with a project.

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