Quilty Feature and Thoughts

Yesterday evening was a bit chaotic when I had to do last minute errands to the post office and grocery store.  I hardly gave it a second thought when I saw that the UPS had made a delivery.  When I finally slowed down and opened the package, I was thrilled to see a copy of the newest issue of Quilty:

On age 83, my Princess improv quilt is featured!  I love what they did with it and feel so honored to be part of the publication.  (I forgot to mention this earlier - but I was also interviewed for an article for last month's issue about participating in modern guilds.  I was quoted (gushing?) in reference to my positive experience in making friendships within the BMQG).  Quilty is the first quilting magazine that I feel is actually accessible for me: it covers quilting topics that are relevant to me and I really like the patterns they publish.  I also love that they frequently feature quilts made out of "stash" rather than constantly promoting specific fabric companies by only featuring quilts made out of one fabric collection or another. 

I also feel honored to be featured in the same issue as my good guild friend, Emily Blatt.  Isn't her quilt stunning?  The design is so simple but the exocution of the fabric choices and placement is genious:

 

The opportunity to have our quils featured in Quilty was thanks to Mary and Marianne Fons visit to the Lowell Quilt Festival last summer.  They toured our BMQG show and visited with the small group that had been manning the exhibit.  It was so much fun to meet them and you couldn't help but feel excited to get back to your machine after chatting with them. 

Mary Fons spoke at the recent convention, QuiltCon.  Craftsy.com has uploaded her presentation and anyone can watch it for free here.  If you don't have time to listen to it (but I assure you it's well worth it!), here are the key points I took away from listening:

• We are at a critical juncture within the quilting industry when the average age of the quilter is static (age 70) and home economics (where so many are introduced to sewing) is not being taught in the schools. 
• Careful attention and senstivity towards the beginning quilter is crucial.  We must be welcoming and encouraging and start with the basics when it comes to educating the newbies.
• Be accepting of other's tastes and styles - in the blogosphere - the phrase is, "It's okay to not like things, but don't be a jerk about it." 
• There will always be different trends in quilting but the bottomline is (quoting Marianne), "When anyone makes a quilt, it's a good thing."

I felt renewed after listening to Mary's presentation.  Recently I have done some reevaluating of my quilting style and preferences as well as the way that I want to approach blogging.  For me, it comes down to this quote that I recently came across, "I just want to make beautiful things even if nobody cares."  That doesn't mean that I am not psyched to be featured in Quilty and winning the Andover contest wasn't awesome- but at the end of the day, I want to quilt and sew simply because I love it.