The Stories Behind Once Upon a Strip

Once upon a time, two girls were reading past bedtime.

Terry Atkinson read Nancy Drew under the covers with her big sister. They shared a bedroom and a single book, which meant they shared a flashlight too. The trouble was, her sister did not wait. She would reach the end of a page and flip to the next without checking if Terry had finished. Terry learned to read fast because if she did not, she lost the page. Years of nightly chapter-flipping turned her into the kind of reader who could keep up with anyone.

A few thousand miles away in Iceland, Gudrun Erla was doing her own version of the same thing. She would wait until her parents thought she was asleep, then quietly hunt down whatever book she could find in the house. She read deep into the night, almost every night, anything she could get her hands on.

Years later, both of them became mothers. Then grandmothers. And both of them found themselves on the other side of bedtime, reading aloud to small kids who wanted just one more chapter. Peter Rabbit. Madeline. Corduroy. The Lorax. The stories that had shaped them, passed forward.

When the two of them started talking about working on a book together, the project found its shape almost immediately. Sixteen quilts. Every one of them named for a character from those bookshelves.

The Familiar Ones

Some you will recognize the second you hear the name. Charlotte. Calvin. Peter. Snoopy. Madeline. Corduroy. The books on every American kid's nightstand. The ones that get worn at the corners and held together with tape and eventually passed down to a younger sibling or a niece or a grandchild who finds them new again.

The Ones You Might Not Know

Some of the quilts are named for characters that may be new to you. That is part of what makes this book worth keeping on the shelf, not just stitching from.

Ronja is from Astrid Lindgren's novel about a robber's daughter who grows up wild and fierce in the Scandinavian forest.

Emil is from another Lindgren story, about a red-headed boy in a tiny Swedish village who finds a way to get into trouble in every single chapter. His father builds him a special woodshed to sit in after each disaster, and by the end of the books that shed is full of carved wooden figures, one for every prank.

Lína is who you might know as Pippi Longstocking. The strongest girl in the world, who lives alone with a horse on her porch and a monkey named Mr. Nilsson.

And then there is Lilli.

Lilli Klifurmús and a Song That Three Generations Have Sung

Lilli Klifurmús, or Lilli the Climbing Mouse, is a character from Dýrin í Hálsaskógi, the beloved Icelandic stage adaptation of the Norwegian children's classic Klatremus og de andre dyrene i Hakkebakkeskogen by Thorbjørn Egner. The story is about a forest of animals who learn to live together by a single rule: no eating each other.

In the play, Lilli sings a lullaby to a fox. The song is "Dvel ég í draumahöll." It is one of the songs every Icelandic kid grows up hearing. The melody settles into them before they can read.

When Gudrun's kids were small, she sang it to them at bedtime. When her grandkids were born, she sang it to them too. And now, her grown children sing it to their own kids, every single night.

A lullaby that started in a Norwegian play in 1953, translated into Icelandic in the 1960s, has wound itself through three generations of Gudrun's family. And now it is one of sixteen quilt patterns in this book.

A Reading List That Crosses Borders

That is part of what we love about Once Upon a Strip. The reading list is not just one country's bookshelf. The quilts borrow from American childhoods, Scandinavian childhoods, British childhoods, and a few corners of the world in between. Each one is named for a story that shaped somebody, somewhere, at bedtime.

The patterns themselves are the kind you will reach for again and again. Every quilt is built on 2.5" strips, designed to play nicely with Gudrun's Stripology rulers and any precut your stash has been holding. Jelly roll friendly. Fat quarter friendly. Scrap friendly. Multiple sizes. Skill levels span a confident beginner's first piecing project to clever techniques that look harder than they actually are.

Once Upon a Strip is open for pre-order now. Two exclusive PDF patterns (Ella and Soffia, not included in the book) will land in your account on June 15. The book ships in August.

Whatever stories shaped you, there is probably a quilt in here named for one of them. And if not, you might just find a new one worth reading.