Saturday, December 5, 2009

My First Quilt Guild Newsletter President's Article

I became my quilt guild's president in October. I've been the VP for the last year, which was a really easy job until the president had a family emergency and couldn't write her submission for the monthly newsletter. I wrote it in her absence in August. I've written three more since then. If you couldn't tell from the long spaces between my blog posts, I'm not an avid writer. I'll let you decide if I'm good at it or not :) I figured since I'm writing something that at least loosely relates to quilting every month that I'd share them with the universe! Here's my August submission - more to come!

Recently my 3½ year old daughter, has wanted to help me sew. More to the point, she wants to sew herself. Just watching is no longer enough for her. Like Mommy, she wants to sit at the machine, guide the material through the needle and push the “foot thingey”. She’s not tall enough to push the foot pedal and still see the needle. So I let her hop on my lap and guide the fabric along its way. The first piece she sewed was a leftover scrap of binding. That went fairly well, so we moved on to leftover block pieces. She joined two of those together. It was so exciting for her. At first, she was so excited that she tried to shove the fabric under the machine’s presser foot as fast as she could. We decided that we’d take scrap pieces and make a quilt for her doll. I’m surprised it isn’t finished yet!

I think I should quilt with the reckless abandon that my daughter seems to have with her new found skill. It’s so much fun watching her do something new. She does not yet worry about the perfect quarter-inch seam or matching corners. We all need to try different things now and then (even if it is applique!) without worrying too much about the results. Many times we do things in our comfort zone and don’t branch out. Try something new. Branch out. If you need inspiration, here’s a great website with hundreds of free quilt blocks: http://www.quilterscache.com/QuiltBlocksGalore.html.