The Cottage Orné Quilt

The Cottage Orné Quilt
Click the picture to visit my other blog

Wednesday 3 August 2011

Little Welsh Quilt - the process

All of you who have written a book, especially a craft book with diagrams and pictures, know that what eventually appears within the covers is just a fraction of the work.  Here is some of the work in progress -



In the past I have enjoyed the process more than the end result, but I must say that working with Vivienne at Rainbow Disks has been very pleasurable and I am very happy with the finished ebook.

Of course I have known and worked with Vivienne for quite a few years and she has become a friend.  It was she, when she worked for David & Charles, who commissioned my first book HOUSE AND GARDEN SAMPLERS and I  remember her phone call asking to meet and discuss it.  I was so thrilled, as it had long been an ambition to write about sampler making and I still look back and savour that exciting time.

Having a book published and on the shelves of a bookstore raises mixed emotions.  On one hand you are pleased that it is there at all and look around furtively to see if anyone is interested - they usually aren't. Then you worry that because there are copies on the shelf they aren't selling!  It's a case of a glass either full or empty again but that's the way if affects me.

Now, of course, we are in another age - books are marketed very differently now to then (the olden days book wise).  I can write telling you about my book here in my workroom and it reaches all over the world - it's wonderful and scary at the same time!

LITTLE WELSH QUILTS can be ordered at -
http://www.rainbowdisks.com/

6 comments:

Susan Briscoe said...

So true! And that first book will now seem so long ago, but memorable.

I liked what you wrote about seeing your book in bookstores. It's different when you see it at a quilt show though, there's much more concentrated interest there - when it's in a bookstore with the latest bestseller fiction and celebrity chef offerings, it makes you feel quite tiny (can't help thinking about the sheer size of a Jamie Oliver print run and then mine LOL).

Hope it does well. What's your stand no. for FoQ?

Vivienne at Vivebooks said...

Mary you have made my day - we did have fun didn't we! I will never forget how well you coped with the video filming, even though on the same day there were two workmen in the next room fitting your new boiler (the banging and hammering)!

Radka said...

My first ebook has arrived! I love it, Mary!
Congratulations!!!
And well done Rainbow Disks for a such fast delivery!
There is a little post about it on my blog :)

Maureen said...

Mine arrived, too! So fast. I just posted about it as well.

Little Welsh Quilts and other traditions said...

Thanks you Maureen for your post. I am glad you like my way of working. No I rarely buy fabrics made for patchwork -I find it more challenging to seek it out from different sources, much cheaper too!

Anonymous said...

I'm posting about it on the LiveJournal quilting community, it's got a large membership and I often rave on about your other book there. I spotted that book at my local library recently and squealed happily to see it. I sing the praises of Welsh quilting at my local quilting group too, so maybe someone from there followed my suggestion and ordered the book in! I'm fairly broke right now, but I'm eyeing up the new book greedily.

Tell you what I'd really love to see, and that would be a pattern sourcebook for Welsh quilting designs. Instead of a gallery of photographs, where quilting is always tricky to capture, and say a dozen projects, as is usual and indeed which I hugely appreciated in your first book, I'd love to see something which just had pages on borders, medallions, corner motifs and so forth, showing a diagram of the pattern in question. A bit like the Grammar of Ornament, that wonderfully useful book. Also tips on how to make a wholecloth - I remember you saying here at some point that you structure a wholecloth quilting design differently, and as I'm planning to start a Welsh wholecloth soon I'd love to know more about that.