The top quilt was a remake of the quilt beneath it, made in Rogers, Arkansas in the summer of 1996. The quilt was rejected for publication because fabrics in the black-and-ivory quilt were too distinctive for publication. Turns out that if you use distinctive fabrics, you'd better be working with the fabric company and designing with it before it's available to the public. Why?, you ask. Well, there are a lot of people who want to make the project just like the picture. With the time it takes to produce a magazine (several months at best), by the time you buy fabric at the store, make the project, submit it to a magazine and have it accepted, send it in, and actually see it in print, that fabric's not in the stores anymore. So I submitted it with the offer to remake it in less distinctive fabrics.

The submission got accepted by Beth Hayes, the editor of McCall's Quilting Quick Quilts, in 1998. The quilt was published in the July 1999 issue of the magazine and it was renamed "Sea Breeze" which seemed a perfectly appropriate name, given that it was created in a beach house on the east coast of Florida.
Funny story about Beth Hayes. She and I worked together for maybe a week when I used to work for McCall's Needlework and she came on board at McCall's Quilting back in June of 1995. Before McCall's Quilting and McCall's Quilting Quick Quilts (now McCall's Quick Quilts) were launched as magazines you could subscribe to, each title was done more than once as a special issue by McCall's Needlework (and Crafts). I was actually involved in helping to produce McCall's Quilting in its first two years as a bimonthly magazine. And about the time I left the company that produced those magazines, Beth came on board. I think she was at my farewell luncheon which may also have been her welcome luncheon. So when I started to consider designing quilts as a freelancer, I turned to her and her magazines first, both due to the fact that I knew her and the fact that I have always felt a certain bond with the titles.