In the middle of a successful academic career, art historian Janet Catherine Berlo found herself literally at a loss for words. A severe case of writer’s block forced her to abandon a book manuscript midstream; she found herself quilting instead. Scorning the logic, planning, and order of scholarship and writing, she immersed herself in freewheeling patterns and vivid colors. For eighteen months she spent all day, every day, quilting. This book penetrates to the very heart of women’s lives, focusing on their relationships to family and friends, to work, to daily tasks. It is a search for meaning at midlife, a search for an integration of career and creativity.

Janet Catherine Berlo, a professor of art history at the University of Rochester who specializes in Native American art, is also a creative writer and quilter. Her many books include Wild By Design: Two Hundred Years of Innovation and Artistry in American Quilts, Spirit Beings and Sun Dancers: Black Hawk’s Vision of the Lakota World, and Native North American Art (with coauthor Ruth Phillips).

"This intriguing and unusual memoir deals with an 18-month period in the mid-1990s when Berlo, a professor of art history and of gender and women's studies at the University of Rochester, was afflicted by writer's block. A successful academic author . . . Berlo abandoned a book she had nearly completed and began devoting a major portion of her time to quilt making. . . . Berlo's vivid account of historical quilting as well as descriptions of her own projects are so compelling, readers may be inspired to try quilting themselves. . . . Most of all, Berlo credits the art of quilt making with teaching her to take joy in the process rather than the finished product and to accept messiness and patience as valuable parts of creativity."—Publishers Weekly

“Berlo relates the conflict and pressures of integrating past and present, career and personal life, life goals and daily chores. Her needle-sharp prose seamlessly integrates quilting history, techniques, bits of poetry, and recipes. Her humor is equally sharp.”—Piecework

"Berlo’s writing captures the intensity of the physical and emotional dimensions of the creative impulse . . . Only someone able to step back and observe herself in the midst of confusion could have given us this very personal, often insightful narrative."—Great Plains Quarterly