Welcome to Quilted By Grace
Every author has a journey to publication which is unique to them. Our story, like so many others, started with the support of friends and family. They dreamt with us and encouraged us in seeing our ideas birthed from our hearts and minds to Quilting Lessons.
Over the years, friends have gathered around us, some from the start and others are more recent travelers. As we share our story, we hope that you would be encouraged that God sees you, He knows your dreams, He nurtures them, and they can be realized. We have learned our part is to remain faithful to the vision and allow God to refine the dream—and expand it no matter how long it may take.
Ellen and Karen have been friends for over 25 years and share a circle of praying friends. Soon after we first met, we discovered a similar passion for writing and desire to encourage others. We began crafting devotions together.
If you’re new to writing, you can imagine our trepidation as we started out. Our journey took us to many writers’ conferences in Washington, Oregon, and Illinois as we shared our ideas for a book. Through the process, we learned to believe in our dream and how to articulate our vision to editors. We held multigenerational focus groups with women to hear feedback on our drafts. What a rewarding experience! We edited our work to make sure what we wrote was resonating with our readers.
Throughout our journey, we submitted our book proposal to nearly a dozen publishers, including some top-tier houses. The editors’ consistent responses? You have a solid message; do not let go of it. Build a platform, continue writing, and pursue your dream. Our desire was to see our devotional produced in full color. The vibrant quilt blocks help tell our stories. This proved difficult for publishers to produce our book at a reasonable cost. Therefore, we signed on with an independent publisher, and we are thrilled with the results!
Where has our author journey led since publication? Quilting Lessons was sold in the South and Midwest at the Women of Joy conferences. Our book has sold in 25 states and has found its way to six countries. We have advertised and had the joy of attending many quilting and craft shows, selling our coffee table-quality devotional and our line of quilt block notecards featured in the book.
Our journey has literally sent us on hundreds of miles. We traveled, we sold books, we met our readers, and our deepest blessing has come from readers’ comments. They tell us that our book has been used to comfort those who are lonely, suffering from illness or a loss or walking through a difficult trial. Quilting Lessons has been used by Bible studies, small groups, in care homes, and in women’s prison ministry. Readers have shared that our devotions are used as opening messages for quilt guild and church meetings. To learn that our devotional is kept on your nightstand is such an honor!
Launching our website, Quilted By Grace, is the next step in bringing Quilting Lessons to an even wider audience. With the pandemic shutdown of last year, all our scheduled events were cancelled. We realized that reaching out to you would need to take new forms. This year has taught us that God is never limited by our restrictions.
We sincerely pray you’ll be strengthened by our online community, Quilted By Grace. We hope you’ll share our devotional with those you seek to encourage. We wish for you renewed hope and peace and the ability to see God at work in your life in 2021!