How do quilting books “earn” their spot on your shelf?
In other words, what will make you feel that they’re worth keeping? I am going through my books and decluttering as I move my sewing things into a newly-spare bedroom (young adult child just moved out on their own). Many of my quilting books have been in boxes since we moved to this house over five years ago, partly because I didn’t have room for them, and partly because I haven’t been quilting much these last couple of years.
The books I know I’m keeping are the block books - I mostly don’t sew patterns or projects por together by other people, I take traditional block patterns and graph paper and come up with something. So a book of beautiful appliqué art quilt type projects is going to go. It’s just not my style and I’m neither going to do the projects in the book or make up my own as the author actually encourages. But I’ll on the bubble about some other books, like a modern quilt book - I won’t probably make the projects, I’ve only made one quilt inspired by a project in the book, but I do find the quilts inspiring and sometimes when I’m thinking of a new quilt I just flip through quilt books to see what others have done and get inspiration. There are several like that, but I can’t keep them all “for inspiration”, or I’ll never get rid of anything, and I don’t have room for them all and other books I will buy in the future.
There are some technique books I know I’ll keep (quilt as you go and other domestic machine quilting techniques, mostly) because although I won’t do the projects, the I’ll refer to the techniques again. But a basic book of appliqué that contains info easily found on the internet is going out, I think.
So I’m curious about other people’s processes for deciding what stays and goes on their own shelves - also how do you know if a book is really going to be worth buying in the first place. So many books just turned out not useful to me at all and were basically a waste of money. Some of my favorites are older books given to me by a quilting friend. I like to preview books at the library but they’ve got a pretty limited selection compared to all of the books out there.