Earlier this year, I created an art quilt inspired by Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever that came to hold more than I expected. What began as just a challenge slowly unfolded into something rooted in memory, healing, and the small, steady act of noticing. The Challenge Through the month of January and into early February, I worked on creating an art quilt inspired by Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever for the Cherrywood Fabric 2026 Art Quilt Challenge. The theme was Storytime – which was described as holding a sense of connection, imagination, and nostalgia inspired by childhood story time. For the challenge, each artist works within a curated palette of Cherrywood hand-dyed fabrics to create their art quilt. For the Storytime theme, the palette felt vintage and full of gorgeous, earthy colors that immediately made me think of the original Frog and Toad books: rust, mango, goldenrod, caramel, sepia, lizard, misty, aqua, and jade. I also chose to incorporate the optional Sketchbook bundle – charcoal, taupe, mahogany, and buttercream to bring in some neutrals. This was my first time working with Cherrywood fabrics, and I absolutely love them. I’ve already started using them in other projects because they’re easy to work with and feel so good in my hands. The challenge uses a juried selection process to assemble a collection of about 250 art quilts that best represent Cherrywood’s vision for the year’s theme. Of course, that’s exciting but when I began, I wasn’t even thinking about selection. I just wanted to commit to something and see it through. Designing, completing, and submitting my piece became the goal and I’m happy to say that I did. Inspiration, Childhood, and The Present Day When I began thinking about which book to draw inspiration from, I returned to one of my favorite childhood books – Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, originally published in 1963. It was the first book he both wrote and illustrated, and it has stayed with me since I was very young. As I worked with the Storytime palette, I saw how naturally it fit with the feeling of that book. I kept coming back to the pen and ink illustrations and the way they translated so easily into appliqué and line work. As a child, I would sit and carefully study those illustrations, noticing and naming everything on the page. It felt like an early form of reading – learning the world by paying attention to it. When I became a mother, I found a copy to share with my boys and watched them do the same thing, drawn in by the animals and their busy lives. They lingered over the pages, taking it all in, just like I did. As I worked on this piece, I found myself returning to that way of seeing and reconnected with that feeling while also honoring something more recent. Last year, just before my breast cancer diagnosis, our family began creating a large monarch waystation in our front yard. When I received my diagnosis in early April, so many plans for the year changed but we held onto that garden. Together, we built a space where the wildness of living things could thrive and be supported. With each round of chemo, it became harder for me to do much in the garden, but it was always one of the first places I returned to as I began to feel better. I spent hours there noticing – watching the flowers bloom, the bees and butterflies and birds that came and went. It gave me something steady to return to, something full of life and beauty to connect to when, at times, life felt really, really hard. As I brought that garden into this piece, I felt the meaning of it more clearly – bringing together childhood, motherhood, and healing in one place. And through its creation, I reminded myself, over and over, that it’s going to be okay. The Process I hesitated to commit to this challenge when I first heard about it, mostly out of fear – the fear of not following through, of setting an intention and not being able to meet it because of my health, my energy, or even my lack of skill. I didn’t want to face another unfinished project. But after thinking about it every day for months, I finally decided to move forward. I ordered the fabrics and the companion Aurifil threads. At first, I chose fat quarters, but I quickly realized they wouldn’t be enough. I needed more of certain colors – especially sepia and lizard – which led to a spontaneous trip to Sew Yeah Quilting in Las Vegas, Nevada to pick up the half yard bundle. I was so grateful that they had it! I began the design process on my living room wall, taping up large sheets of brown butcher paper with blue painter’s tape. At first, I just needed to see what a 20″ x 20″ space actually looked like. From there, I drew out the elements, scanned them in, printed them at different sizes, cut them out, taped them up, and moved them around – stepping back often to study the composition before adjusting it again and again until it felt right. Early on, I knew I wanted a rabbit as the main character. In Richard Scarry’s garden spread, rabbits are shown at work, and I wanted to echo that same sense of life and movement. I chose to show my rabbit watering her plants with a hose – something I love to do in my own garden. When I began stitching, I worked daily, often for long stretches of time. There were days when I stitched for more than twelve hours. I bled for this piece. I developed callouses for this piece. For a time, it became the only thing I thought about. In the design, I included only the plants that grow here: morning glory, cosmos, strawberries, echinacea, salvia, and clover. I labeled each