I believe that every writer who’s ever been published will tell you that meeting deadlines is a slog. You just never feel like you’ve been able to take all the time you need to finesse all the details that you want to finesse. Of course, writers are notorious about noodling over their books because it feels like every sentence could be just a little tighter, word selection could be punchier, etc. etc.

So as much as I dislike deadlines, I must admit they are necessary.

Now I’ve written novels and edited story collections and penned more than one how-to book. But my first how-to, Teach Yourself Visually Quilting (seen here) was the toughest one of all.

As the title indicates, this book leans heavily on imagery. In fact, the theory behind this line of books is that a non-English speaker could learn from them without being able to read them. Take a guess how many pictures are in this book.

Six hundred and forty nine. And I cut and sewed and organized or arranged them all. On deadline.

One would think I learned my lesson after that book so of course when Wiley asked me to do a smaller companion volume requiring only 100 more image, I said yes.

I learned to sew fast and then faster. And I quickly realized that if I was going to survive, I needed to create my examples in such a way that any one piece of sewing could be used in at least two images.

The photographer and I also had size constraints when it came to full quilts–if you stand far enough away from them to get the full piece, you can’t see the details.

This really came into play in the second book when I wanted to explain how to set blocks on point. It’s a technique that allows square blocks to appear as diamond shapes, like this.

Of course I was in a rush and I wanted to use the quilt I was working on to illustrate more than one technique. As a result, it grew a bit bigger than originally planned. And then the one insoluble problem in quilting raised its ugly head.

I ran out of one of the fabrics.

But with no time to regroup or resew, we carried on by folding the quilt just so, and photographing strategic parts of it. And then the book was finished, and that unfinished quilt top lay in a drawer for nearly eighteen years, because, well, there were other things to do.

Now I am in a different mode of life, one where the rule of de-cluttering reigns supreme. So I am finishing up, using up, rehoming, and recycling everything I can while throwing myself in front of the door if anything not immediately usable shows up.

Today, I finally laid that finished, oversized, queen-sized quilt on the bed.

A brand new, eighteen-year old quilt.

It’s never too late to finish a project.