April 2016 Off My Rocker

The Beat Goes On . . .

Ah, to be “Back in the Saddle Again” – demonstrating AnglePlay templates in the Off the Wall Quilting booth at the huge Sewing and Stitchery Expo in Puyallup, WA!  What a joy to see so many friends and students from years past, and watch the sense of wonder on faces of quilters new to the piecing possibilities of AnglePlay!

        What a difference from the very first quilt conference and vendor mall I attended “way back” in the late 1970’s – when I was a professor at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, teaching “Creative Textiles” among other classes.  One of my students introduced me to Ellyn Mosbarger, who had an appliqué pattern (and kit) business called Calico Mouse.   We became fast friends, and she invited me to accompany her and her husband to Portland, OR, where she had a booth at an early  West Coast Quilters Conference – one of the first of its kind in the embryonic quilting industry.  I rode north with Dick and Ellyn in the front of their van chock full of patterns, kits, samples, and booth materials—seated on a bean bag between them! No seat belt laws then, either . . .

       The differences between “then and now” are breathtaking; from slides in carousels (on sometimes poorly performing projectors) to animated power point presentations; from business cards to color multi-page brochures; from standard sewing machines to embroidery machines and longarm quilting machines that “go by themselves”.  Booths were lit with flood lamps from hardware stores; now quilting treasures are lit with LED lights, and instructive videos about them run on continuous loops.

       Then, there were no such thing as blogs and websites and ordering online.  Quilting workshops were available only in classrooms, sponsored by guilds and shops; now, quilters find a multitude of online classes and a plethora of you tube videos to learn thousands of techniques.  All guilds communicated by paper newsletters; interest groups for any topic happened in small neighborhood or guild special interest groups, not online. 

         The creation of acrylic templates and rotary cutting had not begun; Ginghers scissors were the coveted tool, and you didn’t need a special grooved holder for the hundreds of templates available now.  The first set of acrylic geometric templates (only six of them: squares and half-square triangles in a couple sizes, with “Peaky and Spike”) by Doreen Speckmann, were still in the future.

       Patterns for hundreds of tote bags and containers, clothing, gifts, embroidery motifs were a thing of the future too.  So few books on quiltmaking were available, compared to what we have now.  Quilting books had a longer shelf life then, too!   In the seventies, Quilters Newsletter was in its infancy, and national organizations like National Quilters Association (NQA), American Quilters Society, American Quilt Study Group and The Applique Society were embryonic as well.

       Gatherings for week-long workshops with a single teacher, like the Empty Spools Seminar at Asilomar in Monterey, began to take hold.  I remember writing a check for $500 to take a color class from Michael James with such a sense of wonder; I had never spent that much on myself, and was thrilled that I needed to do so for “professional development”!  That workshop was transformative for me as a developing quilter; we used Pantone colored papers and magazine pages as our material, not fabric. Travelling to study with “the greats” in those early years is how I learned quiltmaking; I absorbed not only basic as well as innovative techniques, but many teaching do’s and don’ts, too . . .

     Little did I know that what I learned in those workshops, and the pure joy I felt there among quilters, would propel me all over the country and to international destinations to teach quiltmaking for 35 years.  Thanks to the world of quiltmaking, I have stood at the tip of South Africa, looking out over the Cape of Good Hope, and I have seen the northern lights in the Northwest Territories—for this, I am so grateful.

     So, what is your story?  

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