From the law to quilting and back again.

A fascination with color, shape, precision, and geometry--combined with the Great Recession--led Orlando attorney Michael Sheridan into an artistic quest that includes hours of pedal-to-the-metal that sends his 16-year-old Pfaff sewing machine needling its way through yards of fabric.

The Nova Southeastern Shepard Broad College of Law graduate had a solo practice in Orlando when the housing crisis hit. His business dried up and he wound up losing his home to foreclosure.

Sheridan moved to Kansas City to live with his brother. Having started sewing a few years earlier and not wanting to take the bar exam in another state, he took a job at JOANN Fabrics, but with a personal caveat: "I swore I would never quilt when I got there." He was primarily making placemats, coasters, and "hundreds" of

Christmas stockings.

But, he added, "Time passes on, and they wear you down, and they wear you down, and I guess I've been quilting for about eight years.

"I was working full time at JOANN and I didn't have anything else to do but make quilts so I sat in [his brother's] basement making quilts," Sheridan said.

"When I first started quilting, I was doing other people's patterns. I got bored with that pretty quick. I didn't want to make traditional design block quilts, I wanted to do things that were unique and original and nobody else had done."

A word about quilts for anyone who thinks they are just bed covers or lap warmers. Quilts can be relatively simple to incredibly complex. They may have simple, large blocks or intricately pieced segments craftily stitched with missile-component precision in abstract patterns, specific designs, or even near photo-realistic images.

Quilters can buy a kit with fabric, but must then assemble it. Or they can procure a design and pick their own fabrics, employing an artist's eye selecting between an endless array of solid and patterned fabrics and deciding how to fit them together.

Sometimes the quilter starts with a blank canvas, devising an original pattern and jigsawing in his or her choice of patterns and colors from an infinite palette of cloth.

The finished quilt is typically surrounded by a border of a complementary fabric and then batting and backing are added. The final decision is how to quilt or stitch the layers together. Large block quilts may run the thread along the borders of the blocks, "stitchin the ditch" in quilters' parlance. Others employ more intricate stitching swirls and patterns that become their...