When I started sourcing books for Remnants, I assumed the hard part would be finding them. It wasn't. Old craft books turn up everywhere. Estate sales, church rummage tables, boxes tucked behind boxes in a quilter's closet. The hard part was learning what I was actually looking at once I had one in my hands.
Is this common or is this special? Is it complete? Does anybody still want to make this?
I didn't have good answers to any of that at first. I do now, mostly because I got it wrong enough times to start paying attention.
The booklets nobody kept
The first thing I learned is that thin, stapled things get thrown away.
A hardcover book survives a move. A 12-page pattern leaflet does not. So when I come across something like the Pine Trees Quilt Projects Leaflet from The Quilting Corner, I've stopped treating it like the throwaway it looks like. These little leaflets were often produced in small runs by regional quilt shops or individual designers, sold at a counter, used once, and set aside. The ones that survive fifty years usually survive because someone loved them enough to keep them flat in a drawer.
Same story with Going in Circles with Nine-Patch and First Steps in Quiltmaking by Rita Weiss. Booklets like these rarely get a second printing, and they almost never get digitized. If the pattern inside isn't in a "greatest hits" quilting anthology somewhere, this booklet might be the only place it still exists in a usable, printable form. That's a different kind of value than a glossy hardcover on a shelf. It's closer to an artifact than a book.
Condition means something different for a craft book
With most used books, condition is about the cover, the spine, whether the pages are yellowed.
With craft books, I've learned to look for something else entirely: has anyone used this.
A quilting book with pencil marks in the margins, a folded corner on one particular page, maybe a scrap of fabric still tucked between two leaves as a bookmark. That's not damage, that's provenance. Someone sat with this book and actually made something from it. When I listed Quilts from Simple Shapes by Mary Coyne Penders, the gentle wear on the block diagrams told me more about which patterns actually got made than the table of contents ever could.
That said, I do check for the boring, practical stuff too, like foldout pattern sheets still intact, no pages cut out for tracing (a shockingly common practice before photocopiers were in every home), all the templates present. A book like 24 Flower Quilt Blocks: Full-Size Patterns for Foundation Piecing lives or dies on whether the full-size patterns are still there. If they're gone, the book is basically just pictures now.
The out-of-print ones are the real hidden gems
This is the part that hooked me.
Big-name techniques get reprinted forever. But a lot of the more specific, more inventive titles from the quilting and needlework boom of the '80s and '90s were printed once, sold through, and never touched again. Round About Quilts: Unique Designs Using Wedge-Shaped Pieces by J. Michelle Watts is a good example — a whole technique built around wedge piecing that most modern quilting books don't really cover, because the trend moved on before it got absorbed into the mainstream canon.
The same goes for Strips 'n Curves: A New Spin on Strip Piecing by Louisa L. Smith and Sensational Settings: Over 80 Ways to Arrange Your Quilt Blocks. Neither is rare in the sense of being valuable to a collector. They're rare in the sense that once the print run sold out, that specific approach mostly disappeared from circulation. You can find plenty of modern books that teach you a way to set your blocks. You can't as easily find eighty of them cataloged in one place anymore.
I get a genuine thrill finding a book like Quilter's Color Workbook by Kirstin Olsen or 250 More Continuous-Line Quilting Designs in good shape, because I know exactly what it means to the person who's been quietly searching for it.
Not every gem is about quilting
It's easy to default to quilting because that's where the bulk of what comes through Remnants lands, but some of my favorite finds have nothing to do with fabric at all.
Decorative Painting for the Home by Lee Andre & David Lipe and Painting Fabulous Floorcloths from Sterling Publishing both belong to a specific, slightly forgotten decorative painting era — the kind of tole and folk painting that showed up on everything from breadboxes to floorcloths in the '80s and '90s. Nobody is reprinting these. If you want to learn this specific style the way it was actually taught back then, a used copy is often your only real option.
And sometimes the gem is simply a well-loved teaching book. You Can Be a Super Quilter! by Carla J. Hassel is not rare or hard to find, but it's a genuinely good beginner manual, written with a teach-yourself clarity that a lot of newer books talk around instead of through. Same with Quilting Color Wash Workbook by Shirley Liby — not a unicorn, just a solid, thorough resource that's genuinely useful, priced like the well-loved secondhand book it is.
What I look for now
After enough of these, I've settled into a rough checklist, even if I don't always say it out loud while I'm digging through a box:
- Is it thin? Don't skip it. Booklets and leaflets are often the most fragile survivors and the least replaceable.
- Is it marked up? That's not a flaw, that's a record of use.
- Are the patterns still attached? Foldouts, templates, and full-size pattern sheets are the first things to go missing.
- Is the approach specific? A book teaching one clear, focused technique tends to age better and mean more than a broad, general-interest title.
- Would I know where else to find this? If the honest answer is "nowhere," that's usually the gem.
None of this makes me an expert. I still get surprised. I still occasionally pass over something I shouldn't have, or get excited about a title that turns out to be more common than I thought. But that's part of what keeps this interesting — every box is a small education, and every book is a little bit of someone else's making, waiting to start again with someone new.
If you want to dig through what's currently up, the full books collection is where all of this lives, updated as new finds come in.
