Landscape Quilt Book and DVD by Joyce Becker

Joyce Becker's book Beautifully Embellished Landscapes has a companion DVD, Joyce Becker Teaches You Landscape Quilting. Both are stand-alone items--you don't need one to enjoy or use the other, but together they make a perfect pair that will help you tap into your creativity to create lovely and original landscapes quilts.

There's nothing quite as easy to understand as a visual guide that shows a quilting teacher at work. That's what you'll see in Joyce Becker's landscapes DVD. She begins with a basic overview of landscape quilts, and then progresses forward to show you how to build a quilt, step-by-step.

Joyce discusses fabric and materials selection, showing us some of her favorite products and illustrating how to use them. She moves forward to explain how to prepare a canvas and cut the elements of your quilt. You'll watch Joyce machine baste shapes to the canvas and then move on to the use of threads, inks and paints in landscape quilts.

The tips and techniques that Joyce Becker included in the DVD made me aware that I can do this. That realization came early in the program and was reinforced as she moved forward to explain how to easily handle the tasks that I would have labeled difficult before watching the DVD.

If you want to try a landscape quilt, but felt overwhelmed by the thought of learning a mass of new skills, this DVD will change your mind. Joyce shows us that anyone can make a landscape quilt--no art background or experienced required.

See Joyce Becker Teaches You Landscape Quilting at C&T Publishing.

Joyce's landscape quilting DVD is a hands-on version of the skills you need to make a quilt. Her book, Beautifully Embellished Landscapes, goes into more detail about the processes you see on the disc.

The book is filled with project ideas and resources to help you create many different landscape elements into your quilt. Joyce explains how to make realistic water, trees, skies, mountains and more, using cloth and embellishments to create additional texture that makes the quilts come alive.

You'll find several helpful tree templates in the book, with instructions that explain how to easily put them to use. Joyce passes on lots of tips to help you manipulate fabrics and other materials to make them fit into the scheme of your quilt.

Overall, her theme is easy methods. As in the DVD, Joyce takes what seems to be a complicated process and explains it in a way that everyone can understand.

You needn't buy the DVD to go along with the book, because the book explains every method that's discussed in the DVD. But watching the teacher complete many of the actual quiltmaking processes is perfect motivation. You'll discover that you really can make these quilts.