tdtdesign

Hi gardnergal,

N-o-o-o-o, Laurie is the brains behind the book and the quilt. She had the idea of pairing quilt blocks with the letters from the pony winners before she even finished the proofreading the final pages for the FWS book. She chose the blocks according to their names: Crystal Star goes with the letter from a little girl name Crystal, A Beauty goes with the letter about the pony named "Beauty." At the Depot goes with the letter where the little boy talks about the pony being "at the depot."

So Laurie is the author of the book, she selected the blocks and made the quilt. As project manager and lead designer, I designed and laid out the cover and the book itself, and did all the illustrations for the book and CD. I worked directly with the company that printed the book and burned the CDs. That's because they had to tell me all the technical stuff they needed me to do so the printing would come out right. I had to locate and make arrangements the people to do the extra tasks listed on the copyright page. From the beginning, our friend Barbara Smith (retired Executive Editor for AQS Books) was our Photoshop person who would enhance the pony winner photos, copyedit the text, and technical edit all of my illustrations.

When I say I bossed them around, I only mean that I set the deadlines for when I needed things from them for each phase of the book production. A lot of times I didn't give them much time to meet the deadline because I didn't completely know in advance when I would need things. I would set a tight deadline and then hope they wouldn't be mad at me for not realizing sooner that I needed things from them. I learned a lot about work flow and scheduling for the next time I get to work on a book like this.

Everything took longer than I thought it would. For example, while I was working on the foundation patterns, every morning I'd start out thinking, "There's no reason why I can't finish at least ten patterns today." Ha! The most I ever got done in a day was four. For each pattern, drawing and labeling those little assembly diagrams took a while. Fitting the sections on the pages as close as I could get them to the order they would be sewn together took a long time. And labeling each piece in each section took *forever*.

Then Barbara had to proofread all the patterns, and mark corrections for me to make, then recheck my work. Then Laurie did the same thing. Laurie gave final approval on every page in the book and on the CD.

It's my design, but it's Laurie's book! .