He took up sewing on a dare in high school and hand-stitched a black velvet buccaneer shirt as a first project. He sewed clothes for his family until he graduated and moved away, passing the tailoring torch to his father (who Raymond taught to sew).
During America's Bicentennial, Raymond began his first quilt because he felt quilting was Americana. It was machine-pieced, hand-quilted, and took over four years to complete. Once Raymond learned to machine quilt on his domestic sewing machine, he never looked at hand quilting again.
Raymond learned the operations of symmetry and developed a method for generating patchwork patterns of interlocking shapes known as tessellations, which he has demonstrated on TV and taught online. For more than 20 years, he has made quilts using only one patch...yet the quilts don't look alike.
In June 2019, Raymond created a quilt titled "Love is Love," using Celtic knots featuring the shape of a heart. "Love is Love" was juried into The Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum's 2020 exhibit of quilts made by men, "The Boys are Back in Town!"
Raymond K. Houston has appeared in print and in person around the country, being featured in national quilt magazines and giving talks and workshops to quilt guilds from coast-to-coast.