I’ve always been skeptical of claims that if one focuses intensely enough on the thought of something, that something will manifest in real life. Yet here I was at a neighborhood garage sale staring at an example of the very something I had been focusing on non-stop for the past six months—and it was only happenstance that I was there. I wouldn’t have bothered with the sale except that the bright fall day was perfect for a walk and the sale was just a few blocks from my house.

I’d very recently finished the manuscript for book number one in my new mystery series. Like my Knit & Nibble series, the mysteries in the new series will be craft cozies featuring a female amateur sleuth. But whereas the craft in the Knit & Nibble series was—duh!—knitting, the craft in the new series is quilting. My sleuth, Caroline Platte, is a curator at a crafts museum. Her special interest is quilts, and she herself is a quilter who makes custom quilts on commission.

As I was developing the series, I immersed myself in the world of quilts, reading books and studying catalogues from museum exhibits, poring over photographs of quilts old and new and absorbing their deep roots in American history.

The sale featured the usual neighborhood garage-sale offerings: castoff clothes not old enough to be vintage, and kitchen ware, and children’s toys, as well as lots of Halloween costumes and party decorations, which would have been great finds for someone (not me). And then, on a table of folded sweaters and sweatshirts, I saw a flash of patchwork. Thinking it was perhaps a blouse or jacket sewn from fabric printed to look like patchwork, I picked it up.

It was larger than I expected, much larger, folded into a compact rectangle, and it was a genuine piece of genuine patchwork. The pattern was based on blocks about two inches square. Some were solid color, a pale yellow. Alternating with them were blocks composed of eight triangles pieced together to form four one-inch squares. The triangles had been cut from patterned fabrics of all sorts, completely random, tiny stripes, plaids, checks, old-fashioned prints in every color imaginable. As I discovered when I looked on the reverse, all the stitching had been done by hand. And it was huge—large enough to fit a double bed, as I discovered when I got it home.

Someone had been very busy! But not the woman who was selling it at her garage sale. She said she had bought it at a craft-society rummage sale, and I knew exactly what she meant. My mother was a quilter and belonged to a quilt society. Once a year her group would host a sale to which members could donate quilt-related items: maybe lengths of fabric left over from a project, maybe half-finished projects that didn’t hold the quilter’s interest anymore, and maybe even half-finished projects inherited from someone who died mid-project.

Quilts particularly lend themselves to the unfinished-project phenomenon. A full-size quilt takes a very long time to make, starting with the separate blocks that will be joined together to form the top. Once the top is complete, backing and batting have to be added, and then the top has to be fastened to the backing by means of quilting, either hand or machine. (An alternate way to anchor the top to the backing is to use yarn ties at intervals, in which case the finished product is often called a comforter rather than a quilt.)

This process can stall at any point. In the case of my garage-sale find, the creator had finished her entire top but had gotten no farther. Had she died? There’s no way of knowing. But the fact that all the work of piecing the blocks and joining them together was done by hand—as well as the old-fashioned patterns of the fabrics used for the triangles—suggests that the work was done a very long time ago.

Then at some point someone had contributed the quilt top to the rummage sale at which my neighbor found it. She told me that she had intended to finish it but had never carried through on that plan. One never expects to pay much for anything at a garage sale, and sure enough, this treasure was mine for $20.

I own a wonderful book documenting a quilt exhibit at the Oakland Art Museum. The exhibit featured quilts made by African-American quilters whose roots were in the South but who ended up in California because in the 1940s good jobs were available in the defense industry. The quilts themselves are magnificent and the stories attached to them are fascinating. Some are composed of mismatched quilt blocks that seem juxtaposed by accident—but somehow the effect is more appealing than a too-careful symmetry.

The quilt’s story might reveal that a beloved grandmother died and left behind a handful of complete quilt blocks that a granddaughter then supplemented with her own creations. Or a whole quilt top was completed by the original creator, but decades passed before a subsequent generation turned it into a quilt.

That is going to be the case with what I now think of as my rescue quilt. The hardest part has been done, and the original creator is surely long gone, but her creation deserves to live on as a finished quilt. My quilt-mystery protagonist has devoted her life to rescuing, preserving, and interpreting antique and vintage quilts, and it seems I am going to have a chance to do my part as a result of a garage find that fate seems to have destined.