Michelle Cain made her first quilt and was hooked! She now designs modern quilt patterns and has written her first book.
When did you first realize you are a creative person?
I was definitely crafty as a young girl. I had a hand in a lot of the craft trends from the eighties—cross-stitch, stenciling, and so on. I sold my first items at a craft show when I was 12.
My favorite memory of my childhood creativity, however, was when I was in elementary school. My sister and I started a stationery store in our basement and made our parents buy our handmade cards. In my mind, this was a long-standing creative endeavor, but it may have just lasted a few days. I suspect if I asked my parents, they wouldn’t remember the cards, but I do!
For many years, I set aside my crafty hobbies to focus on academics. It wasn’t until I was an adult and my husband and I built a house that I began sewing. When I couldn’t find home décor items I liked on store shelves, I started making pillows and curtains myself.
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How long have you been quilting and designing? How did you get started?
I started quilting in 2013, but I started thinking about quilting many years before that.
The first two books in my quilting library were Denyse Schmidt Quilts and Last-Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts, by Joelle Hoverson. I would pore over the projects in those volumes, daydreaming about the quilts I might make someday. I couldn’t get my brain around the quilting part of the process, though, and that prevented me from sewing a quilt top for years. (At the time, I didn’t know that I could pass a project to a longarmer for quilting. I thought all quilters finished their own projects!)
Finally, I decided to go for it. I made a humble top of 8-inch squares and quilted it on my domestic. That’s all it took—I was hooked!
Not long after that, I began blogging as From Bolt to Beauty and got involved with the Modern Quilt Guild.
Designing my own projects seemed like a natural progression for me, and I posted tutorials even in the early days of blogging. I formally launched From Bolt to Beauty patterns in 2020.
Where do you find your inspiration for your designs?
Everywhere! The camera roll on my phone documents the everyday items and scenes I encounter that spark creativity in me. Often it’s something as mundane as the shingles of an old home in the Massachusetts town where I live, an insignia on my son’s shirt, or the angles of paving stones in a friend’s backyard.
Some of my original designs are one-off artistic endeavors. I am equally challenged—and rewarded—by designing quilts for others to make themselves, though. Before I was a quilter, I was a writer and editor, and I put a lot into crafting the instructions for my patterns.
Describe your creative space.
I took over the dining room years ago! We so rarely used the space for formal meals, and I get the luxury of sewing at a huge table. Every so often I’ll dream about turning a bedroom into a sewing space or overhauling our finished basement, but the dining room suits me fine. The key for me is having a dedicated space that I don’t need to clean up between sewing sessions.
Over the years, my fabric stash outgrew the chest of drawers it lived in, and I found myself squirreling fabric in various rooms throughout the house. Last fall, I consolidated all of my fabric in shelves in my basement. (It’s not ideal that the fabric lives on a different floor than my sewing machine, but it’s not a deal breaker, either). This simple reorganization has helped me. I have a better grasp of what fabric I have and find myself using what I own instead of buying more.
Are you a “finisher”? How many UFOs do you have?
I almost always have a dozen projects going on at once. Sometimes I just want to cut up fabric. Other times, I crave the meditative process of guiding fabric under the needle of my machine. Having multiple projects in process simultaneously means there’s always a project at a certain stage on a given day, allowing me to follow my whims. But 12 seems to be my limit. If my WIP list gets longer than that, overwhelm sets in.
Scraps. Saver? Or be done with them?
I’m a saver, absolutely! Sewing with scraps plays to my thrifty nature. Plus, scraps are the underdog of my stash, and I get a thrill out of making something out of bits that others would consider useless. Using scraps is a creative challenge I am happy to take on!
Bigger chunks of fabric are sorted by color. Odd-shaped bits are cut into 2- or 2.5-inch squares. I recycle everything smaller than a 2-inch square. Solid fabrics are cut into 2.5-inch strips and stored together. It’s a system that works for me!
Tell us about your book, Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts. What inspired you to write it?
I’ve always has a weakness for jelly rolls, those spirals of 2.5-inch fabric strips are too pretty to pass up.
When I first started sewing with them, though, I was really stuck on the fact that they’re called “precuts.” I thought that because they’re precuts, sewing with them was a shortcut or time saver. Some of the cutting was already done for me, so I would get to a finished quilt top that much faster, right?
As time went on, I started to think of a jelly roll as a cross-section of a fabric collection, and that allowed me to explore more-creative possibilities with jelly rolls.
Sometimes those long strips stay as long strips in my final quilt top. Sometimes I sew the strips together along the long edges to create strip sets, cut those strip sets into smaller units, and then sew the units into different configurations. (It’s a humble technique that saves a ton of time!) And for some designs, I strive to use every square inch that those 2.5-inch strips afford me. The result is jelly roll quilts that don’t necessarily look like jelly roll quilts!
What is the most important takeaway you want readers to gain from the book?
I would hope this collection of quilts would show readers the versatility of 2.5-inch strips. I want them to dust off the jelly rolls in their own stash and let that fabric have its day in the sun as a beautiful, finished project.
In the book, I always point out when I’ve gone rogue and supplemented a jelly roll with fabric from my stash or combined the unused strips from multiple rolls into one project … I hope that encourages quilters to be flexible when working with jelly rolls. You don’t need to buy the exact jelly rolls I sewed with; you can do so much with what you already have on hand.
And I really wanted to write a book that would have a long life in people’s quilting libraries. The collection spans the gamut size-wise, providing instructions for everything from quick-to-sew table runners and wall hangings to bed-size quilts. I indicate the skill level on every project, so readers know how much time and focus a particular design requires. Plus, some projects call for a partial jelly roll, some use an entire jelly roll, and others require more than one. No matter what you have on hand and how much time you can devote to a project, there’s something for you in the pages of Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts. Plus, I think the projects lives up to the name. There are other jelly roll books out there, but none of them is quite like the one I’ve written.
How did writing a book help you evolve as a creative?
The most valuable lesson I learned from designing the patterns in my book is this: Creativity is a discipline. Not every idea is worth pursuing to its end. Not every idea will result in a pattern. But you have to put the time in, and doing that regularly matters.
Some projects happen fast. The book’s I Heart Rainbows came together quickly for me.
Another project—a Halloween-themed medallion quilt—never came to fruition. I spun my wheels on and off for weeks on that design. In the end, I bailed on the original idea but took blocks from that work and made them into two different quilts: Five Little Ghosts and Meow Mates.
There was a certain freedom to writing the book. When I work on a standalone pattern, the stakes seem so high—it’s a single design I’m sending out into the world. With the book, I think the sum is greater than the parts. And because I was designing a collection instead of a single pattern, I gave myself a lot of freedom to follow ideas I might not have pursued otherwise.
Some of the designs are big, bold, geometric—quilts that play to the modern-traditional aesthetic that drew me to quilting. Others are super cute. I love hearts and ladybugs and rainbows, and all three can be found in quilts in the book. I have embraced my love of “cute”!
What do you do to keep yourself motivated and interested in your work?
Sometimes, the best thing I can do is to walk away from a project. I value the benefits of making headway on a challenging project through fresh eyes. It could be as simple as spending a few days away from my sewing table, but boy, it helps.
Where can people see your work?
Everything I create—whether it’s from my own original designs or someone else’s pattern—is documented on my blog. I also post on Instagram. Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts has officially been released into the world. You can purchase a copy from online retailers, your local quilt shop, or directly from me!
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Interview posted May 2025
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