Waaaaay back in the spring of 2013, I was driving to Wegmans with my husband on one of the rare days when he was off work but the kids were in school and we could go eat sushi and Indian food and shop for cheese without two shorties wondering loudly every five minutes when they would be rescued from this, their own personal hell. It tends to make us a bit giddy. He was driving and along the way, I happened to notice a truck for a printing company that had an interesting logo. The picture that I snapped from the car is gone, but here is the logo:
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Naturally, I started thinking about quilt blocks. As one does. After we got home, I sat down at the computer and contemplated the logo. I knew it wouldn't work as it was, as I didn't want to just copy it anyway. But seeing it from far away in a moving vehicle during a light drizzle made me start thinking about blocks that were essentially half negative space, and constructed like a log cabin block. Set on point. As I played, I saw that I didn't want all the strips to be the same width, I eliminated green from the palette entirely, and I didn't use as much negative space as I had first envisioned. There was a lot of mind changing. And mouse clicking. I ended up with two blocks, and I loved they way they worked together.
After I worked out the design on paper, I figured out my fabric requirements and wrote out instructions that I would then have to follow myself as I constructed the quilt, to see if it actually worked. And by some miracle it did. I called it Breaking The Waves.
I was still working for Generation Q at the time, and I showed the finished quilt top to the editors, who said that they wanted it as a project for the magazine. Crap! That meant I had to quilt it, and I really didn't want to do that myself, so I begged Lisa Sipes to fit it in when she could. Lisa was in such demand, I figured she might never get to it and this would effectively eliminate any chance of my creative effort put on display for the world to see and judge, which was a win as far as I was concerned. I'm still a little shy about these things sometimes.
She brought it to me all finished at spring Quilt Market last year, and I brought it home to bind and be-sleeve. (Technical term, that.) Despite the wait, GenQ still wanted it, so I took it to our local beach to photograph for them.
They scheduled it for the January/February 2015 issue, which has just been released and should be appearing on newsstands now. And not only is this my first published quilt pattern, they even put it on the cover!
Big thanks to the GenQ art director Lisa Lauch for making my quilt (and my photos) look so pretty on the page. I am obligated to tell you that you should totally buy this issue and if you can't find it in a local store you can buy individual copies here or go to this page to find an online retailer that carries it. And while I do hope you buy it, what I really hope is that if you see it on a newsstand somewhere, you will pick it up and wave it around while yelling "I KNOW HER! I KNOW THE WOMAN WHO MADE THIS QUILT! AS MUCH AS ANYONE CAN REALLY BE SAID TO 'KNOW' SOMEONE ELSE THROUGH BLOGGING AND SOCIAL MEDIA. BUT STILL." But after that they'll probably make you buy it or pay some kind of restitution or fine, so be prepared.
