After seeing all the traditional patterns, I determined that I needed to make an original design so I started with graph paper, my colored crayons, and I drew a quilt design with green, brown and white fabrics – to match my bedroom.  By counting how many squares, rectangles and triangles I needed, I used my handy calculator to figure out how much fabric to buy and merrily went shopping at the local fabric store. I carefully made my templates from stiff cardboard, traced their outlines on the fabric and using my scissors, carefully cut out each piece of the "soon to be" quilt.  After hours of sewing the different pieces together, I realized I had made a colossal mistake!  Somehow, I had miss-calculated my fabric requirements by one-half and as I sped back to the store to buy more fabric, I learned my first lesson in quiltmaking:  always by more fabric than you need because it won't be available if you run out.  And that is as true today as it was then.

Well!  I decided that if I had made the mistake, so would many quilt-makers who were creating their own patterns instead of following instructions on a traditional quilt.  So I called up a good friend from college, Judy LaBelle, who was an accomplished sewer myself, and said, "We should write a quilting book!"

And so we did.

Our first book was called The Patchwork Quilt Coloring and Design Book.  When it sold well, our publisher asked us to write 2 more and so we did.  The next two books were Patchworking:  A Quilt Design and Coloring Book and the Quilter's Precise Yardage Guide.