bluemeadowdesigns

Day 57 - of 100 Days of Quilts

Prairie Acres

Today we are going back to the beginning. Do you remember me talking about the absurdly long village I created when I learned how to paper piece? Well, that long row of houses inspired other villages, city streets, country school houses, and churches. We had so many idea's that we put them all together, and sent them off to Martengale & Co. And that is how our first book was created.

When you send in a book proposal, there is a lot of information that needs to go along with it. You also need to send a sample of your work, so that they can look at your workmanship to make sure that it is up to their standards. This is the project that we made to send a long with our proposal. Well, actually this is the second version of the project.

We have had an enormous education in writing books, and magazines. We first created this book using 5" blocks. As we went through the process of writing the book, we realized that the actual 'print area' on a page is 7" x 9". So if we kept the blocks this size, it would greatly increase the number of pages in the book, which would increase the cost of printing, which would ultimately increase the final price tag of the book. So, we re-created this project using 4 1/2" blocks, so that 2 blocks could be printed on each page. And we also made sure to keep these measurements in mind as we created the other chapters as well. (You can have great quilt creations in your head, but when you have to put them down on paper, you may have to edit your grand idea.)

Our first book 'Down in the Valley' was broken into four very distinct chapters. The first chapter was called Prairieland, and it was very important to us, because it represented where we live. This small table square has fields as the center, and it surrounded by a farm, a school house, a town and a church. It really was fun to create, and looking at it again, I almost get the itch to start piecing houses again.

See you tomorrow.

-myra