I no longer remember whether the title Aurora came first, or whether its definition, "...an atmospheric effect in which light is fractured into bands of color" was the spur, but in the making of this quilt I found my groove unequivocally. Everything fell into place – color, composition, materials and techniques – to produce a work whose visual and structural integrity was exactly what I sought.

That said, it wasn't fully embraced when I first sent it out into the world. In response to the quilt's appearance in a juried show (in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, if memory serves) contemporaneous with the making of the quilt, the art writer for the local newspaper wrote "One of the most popular pieces in the show is Michael James's 'Aurora' ...though it's too much like the work of Sonia and Robert Delaunay to be considered wholly original." [I'm paraphrasing there slightly, because the bulk of my papers are no longer at hand – they're held in the Special Collections of the UNL Libraries here in Lincoln, so not handy. But that rubbed me the wrong way at the time, so it stuck.]

I'd long admired the work of the Delaunays, French artists and designers who contributed to an early 20th century contemporary art trend called "simultaneism" and were visually connected with color synchromy as practiced by a number of American painters of the time. No question that all of those artists influenced my work as it was developing in the 1970s. After all, I'd been studying their work and their writings since undergraduate art history classes put it all before me.

I've since seen numerous Delaunay exhibitions including the big Sonia Delaunay retrospective that the Albright-Knox in Buffalo organized in 1980 (I saw it at the Chicago Art Institute in 1981 during its six city North American tour), the major Sonia and Robert retrospective at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in the summer of 1985, the double Delaunay show that the Kunstmuseum Bern (Switzerland) did in 1991, and "Color Moves: Art & Fashion by Sonia Delaunay" at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in 2011. So, a fan – absolutely!

Sonia Delaunay was a dynamite painter, but perhaps equally important, a textile and fashion designer who in 1910 or 1911 made a patchwork coverlet for her infant son, an object that's well documented. Loved that construction when I first saw it, and love it still. Her color blocking was confident and out-of-the-box, and that was what I aspired to in my own work.

It would be disingenuous of me to deny a Delaunay influence, as it's there. There's also the influence of artists like Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, the Russian Kandinsky, Ernst Kirchner and the German Expressionists, and others. It all gets filtered in one way or another, blended, fused. And there are roots and inspirations in patchwork and quilt design, in the color sensitivities I found in Amish quilts when I first began studying them, and in the sensibilities and economies I discovered in simple geometric pattern structures like "Drunkard's Path," cut from modest cotton fabrics, stitched by hand along quarter-circle seams. In the end, Aurora is its own thing, but a consequence of lots of other things. The more the merrier!

In the first years of my practice I almost always started a piece, large or small, with a sketch, sometimes a simple line drawing and other times a full-on maquette. That was the case with Aurora and its initial development in 1977. I did the first rendering in colored pencil on blue-lined graph paper, somewhat crude and very worked, and with some collage elements in places where I thought twice and committed to a change of either colors or orientation. Eight square "blocks" by nine, or a total of seventy-two units that would be hand- and machine-pieced, and eventually hand-quilted. This sketch, now in the collection of the International Quilt Museum here in Nebraska, suffered its share of scrapes and abrasions over the years given that I carried it around with other sketches and outlines to show and discuss in workshops and sometimes at exhibitions.

Once I had the actual quilt underway, I had the idea to "upgrade" and refine the original drawing, and turned to watercolor for that second iteration. With the help of some metallic pigments I'd found in an antiques shop, their gold, silver and bronze tones held in small porcelain "cups" the size of a quarter, I was able to create a more resolved interpretation of the quilt as it was beginning to come along on my worktable. So it's a work in which I invested heavily, knowing that I would execute it almost entirely by hand and that process would take many months. I wanted to get it right.

The photo immediately below was taken in mid-February of 1978, in the "living room" that doubled as a studio in our small, four-room apartment on Euclid Avenue in Somerset, Massachusetts, where we'd settled in 1974. In fact, it was taken on one of the first post "Blizzard of '78" days, when we were still in a kind of lockdown following on the nearly 30 inches of snow that fell in southeastern New England during that storm. I'd completed the top, basted the quilt's three layers together and was hand-quilting it in a large hoop. The quilting took me through that winter, and in an early January 1978 letter to my quilt artist friend Radka Donnell (see below), I referred to it as being "in progress." On the wall by the bookcase is the watercolor maquette mentioned above – a guide and at the same time, an interpretation.

So, in that winter of 1978 I was looking forward to the pending publication of The Quiltmaker's Handbook, I had a work-in-progress that I knew would impress, I had enough adult education teaching gigs in play to assure, combined with my wife's income from her own sewing classes, revenue sufficient to keep our household afloat. If the world wasn't quite my oyster, things were heading in the right direction. The future seemed as bright as my sunlit workspace.