Before it was in Houston...

You might recognize the quilt on the upper right of this book cover.  Yes, it's Out of the Depths, the quilt from yesterday's blog.  Sometimes people ask where quilters get their ideas.  For me, there are sometimes mornings where I wake up with a quilt design sitting in my brain, and all I have to do is sketch it.  That's the easy part, then comes drafting the blocks and choosing the fabrics and cutting them and sewing them and quilting and binding and making a label.  That's what happened with this quilt.  I made it to enter another House of Fabrics contest.  And after the contest, I got a letter asking if I would allow them to put it in a book, along with other winners from that contest.  And best of all, they were going to pay me for it!  So, I mailed the quilt off to be photographed and measured.  Because of the oddly-shaped blocks, there were a LOT of templates to be drawn.  The instructions for this one took up 12 pages of that 60 page book.  A couple of years later, I met some ladies from a quilt shop in Galveston, TX at the quilt show.  They were the only ones I ever met who actually made this quilt from those patterns.  So I have a grandquilt out there.  I hadn't expected anybody would actually be crazy enough to take this one on.

When choosing the fabrics for this quilt, I needed to make four piles.  Dark darks and dark lights for the slanted blocks, and light darks and light lights for the straight blocks.  Choosing fabrics is always one of the fun parts to me.  And as usual, I chose a LOT of prints, since they add so much interest and visual texture.  There's an old rule about this, too, the Rule of 30--if you use at least 30 different green (or red, or any other color) prints, they will go together.  Take a look at a lot of old quilts, and you will see this is true.

My statement in the book:  "I had been feeling sorry for myself because I am getting arthritis in my hands and can no longer piece or quilt by hand for hours at a time.  So, when I got tired of feeling sorry for myself (such a waste of time), I worked on perfecting machine piecing and took workshops on machine quilting.  The applique on this quilt, I did by hand, working an hour or two at a stretch, but I am learning several machine applique techniques for the future.  This quilt has been a true growth experience."  And that's where the title of the quilt came from.  As that little vine starts down in the depths of that quilt and wanders out to the edge, so my attitude improved when I moved forward from fretting about what I couldn't do to explore what I can do.

Much to my surprise, I found this little book is still available on Amazon.  I'm guessing they don't sell very many, since it was published18 years ago.