This is the first stop! Today, I want to give you an honest story about the Book that nearly wasn’t. I’ll try to keep it short.

I came up with the idea for Quilt By Numbers – as was my original name for the book – when I was asleep at home in the UK in 2015. I scribbled it down in a notebook I still have today. I was absolutely not going to compromise on the following as the identity of the book: full size patterns, a key that bleeds over the edge of the page for easy colour matching and a diagram that could be coloured as you go along, if you wish.

I started writing and designing the proposal while sat at my mother in law’s kitchen counter in the two weeks before moving country. We had no house, all our belongings were on the way to the docks in a container and I had sold my sewing machine, but I still had my plan, and a set of guidelines to follow to submit my idea for consideration.The first publisher I approached, my favourite – C&T – contracted it for their Stash imprint, agreeing with me on exactly the format I wanted! So so lucky!

You may have noticed a few months after we moved to Canada, my blog posts got fewer and I had no new projects to share. This is because I was working frantically at book projects! It started off as a 10 project book – and I made all of those projects – 5 small items and 5 larger quilts. There was even a triptych of deer. After those initial designs were made up and edited (by Karla), there was a short delay as some of the projects were pulled and replacements were made or in some cases, little tweaks to the existing quilt, like redrawing eyes, or changing shades of fabric. It got edited by a second editor (Monica), proof read and then it was over to the photographers – things were getting super real!

It then suddenly got downgraded to four patterns and the book became a pattern pack – or as I lovingly call it, a book(ette) – and this further extended the time to publication as I debated for several months if this is what I truly wanted. But, this is good news for a few reasons:

1) It makes it cheaper for you to buy it! Four projects and 32 pages plus design sheets is much cheaper than 128 pages (including patterns).
2) It fixed a problem we were having getting all of the designs at full size. Some of the patterns were going to be download only from the C&T site, which I wasn’t hugely happy about. Now all of the patterns were available in the product, at full size.
3) I actually still had a publication under way, it wasn’t completely cancelled.
4) It means I now have a spin off series of expansion pack patterns!

Yep, I have 5 new patterns, in my pattern shop HERE. In the next day or so they will also appear in my Etsy and Craftsy pattern shops, however you will need to own Paint By Number Quilts in order to know how to put the pattern together. It’s like buying a computer game or a board game, finishing it but then being able to expand the universe of that world! And because you can pick and choose the pattern, which are between $5 and $7 CAD, it’s still cheaper than buying a full book. You win again!

Here are the other designs you can get. There’s a fawn and a doe, both of which are the same size as the stag in the book so you can still make the triptych as it was intended:

There’s a larger mouse quilt which is one of my favourites because I quilted it so nicely, which went down very well at the Stampede Western Showcase:

You can make a rabbit notebook! This was pieced and put together by Krista Hennebury who kindly helped me hit the second design deadline I had. I daresay she does a nicer job than I do and I will be sad to hand her sample back to her:And of course, Hank had to be in the first pattern releases:

If these work out I’ll have more. I have a moose, a different bear to the one in the book, a cat pillow, a sprinting Hank, a horse and maybe even my latest Blue Jay creation will find its way into a real pattern too!

I’ll make proper posts for each finished quilt very soon, it seems wrong that they’re not on my finished quilts page.

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There will be posts on blogs and Instagram for the next two weeks from these fantastic people, please give them a follow:

Monday Sept 17 – Kerry @ PennyDog
Tuesday Sept 18 – Deirdre @ C&T Publishing
Wednesday Sept 19 – Anita @ Daydreams of Quilts
Thursday Sept 20 – Sarah @ Coopcrafts *
Friday Sept 21 – Krista @ Poppyprint *
Monday Sept 24 – Elizabeth @ OP Quilt
Tuesday Sept 25 – Wendy @ The Crafter’s Apprentice
Wednesday Sept 26 – Angela @ Heart of Charnwood *
Thursday Sept 27 – Leanne @ She Can Quilt *
Friday Sept 28 – Katy @ The Littlest Thistle
* Instagram link