Catherine stitched her way into history without a pattern. More than a century later, Rachel followed the thread, learning with each new draft how to weave the history into a picture book.
She joined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, attended conferences, took classes, and worked with a writing coach and professional editors. She studied stacks of picture book biographies as mentor texts, paying attention to structure, pacing, language, page turns, and the relationship between words and pictures. She discovered that a shorter book is not an easier book. Fewer words simply give each one fewer places to hide.

The facts were only the beginning. The harder work was finding the heart of the story, keeping Catherine at the center, and helping young readers understand all that followed from one hand-tufted bedspread: the women she taught, the work they did from home, the growth of a cottage industry, Dalton’s rise as the Bedspread Center of the World, and the technology that later helped build the modern carpet industry.

Rachel interviewed Catherine’s great-niece and learned that the family called her Cathy, the name young readers meet in the book. She worked with historians at the Whitfield-Murray Historical Society and the Bandy Heritage Center, listened to local knowledge, studied artifacts and records, and invited experienced historians to tell her where the manuscript rang true and where it misfired.

To build an accurate visual world, Rachel created an extensive research deck and a spread-by-spread art guide for illustrator Katie Hickey. She gathered photographs, maps, timelines, textile patterns, clothing references, tools, architecture, machines, advertisements, and the ordinary details that make the past feel inhabited rather than merely explained.
TUFTED took shape slowly, the way lasting things often do: through study, humility, many helping hands, and a willingness to keep working until the story felt not only told, but honored.