Just about the Retreat!! In fact, just the Trunk Show

Before I start talking about what happened at it, I want to say that it was absolutely wonderful!! I met many lovely quilters, I had a great weekend. I had a wonderful time talking about the quilts that I have made and seeing the amazing things that the other quilters were making!!

I was asked to teach a course. In case anyone has read my rants on bags (I think I have made 45 of them now, and I have one more on order, and have been approached about another, but I don't have any details about the second one...) THIS is what started off the whole 'bag' trip. To recap, I designed a bag to teach at this course. When I got it done it was HUGE! So I made a smaller one - with a chop suey pocket, so we called it the Chop Suey Bag - and sent it off to Helen to show to the ladies in the Quilt Guild.

Then, I made a smaller one still, just for fun. And I showed it to my mom who liked it, and showed it to the ladies in the office and kitchen where she lives, and the next thing you know I was up to my eyeballs in orders for bags.

Included in teaching a class (whch I had done before, both quilting and non-quilting) was a Trunk Show.

I had never done a trunk show before, so I spent some time thinking about it. My friend Scott in Nebraska told me his pet peeve with trunk shows. He said, "Don't hold up each quilt and say, 'I made this quilt.'" And then hold up the next one and say the same thing. (Or variations on it...) Made sense to me.

I have to digress briefly (or possibly not so briefly... bear with me.) I went back to school as an adult. I was working full time as a Library Technician in two Elementary Schools and I went back to College to get my Library and Information Technician diploma. I was technically very proficient with computers. I did learn things in the program, but there were courses that I could have taught instead of taking - Computer Fundamentals should be included in that list. (We learned how to copy and paste and how to rename a file. We had one poor lady in the class who had NEVER turned a computer on in her life... When the instructor told her to move her mouse up, she lifted it off of the mouse pad... oh, it was awful!)  Anyway. We had several different instructors. Some of them were wonderful. Some of them were not so good. One lady was AWFUL! She inspired me to be a better teacher than she was...

So I needed to know what I was going to show, and what I was going to say. How long did they want me to talk? (I was expecting 25 minutes or so...) 45 minutes to an hour would be about right.

Eeek! (Those of you who know me IRL will know that talking is not a problem for me. However, this Trunk Show was a fundraiser and they opened it to the public - so there could be quite a few people there - and not people with whom I would be spending the weekend quilting.)

So I made a list of the quilts that I wanted to show. And then, just in case I got up in front of everyone and drew a complete blank, I wrote what I wanted to SAY about each quilt or quilted object. As I wrote quilts down, I realized that I was going to talk about my journey in quilting from the very first item I made right through to the thing I finished the afternoon of the Trunk Show! (And one thing more that wasn't actually finished... there are only so many hours in the day!) So I had a theme. I didn't really expect to read what I had written - but I am a good reader (lots of practice!) so I figured it wouldn't be a complete disaster if I lost my marbles right there in front of everyone.

I emptied out three rubbermaid containers full of stuff being stored in the house, enlisted the Beloved Dearly's help. Beloved and I piled quilts up from all over the house - I have them on couches and chairs. On my coffee table, on our bedroom walls, on two quilt racks in the living room, hanging as the headboard in our guest room, and pinned up on the walls all over the house. I borrowed back two quilts from Mom and Dad, Christmas gifts from several years ago. I read the list and Beloved carefully folded and stashed the quilts. We started with the last bin, and the LAST quilt, and put the quilts in one on top of the other in the reverse order  that I was going to talk about them. I wrote the numbers 1, 2 and 3 down on pieces of paper and put them on top of the top quilt in each bin before we put the lids on. I had thirty quilts in the end and a couple of quilted squares for classes that I have taught. And I included the Chop Suey Bag that Helen had had for the past 5 months.

Just before the Trunk Show started I had a moment of stage fright. But while Helen was introducing me, it vanished and away I went... I talked for an hour. People smiled encouragingly, oohed and aahed in the right spots and laughed on cue... Whew! What a relief.

At the end, people told me it was the best trunk show they had ever seen. (No one told me they were the best quilts they had ever seen - and I wouldn't have believed them if they had.)

But I did get accolades for having something interesting to say about each quilt. I tried to talk about the things that made quilting FUN for me: The things that made each quilt memorable or funny. I talked briefly about techniques, classes I had taken or taught, and things I had designed.

I also got accolades for having everything in order. Have you ever been to a Trunk Show and the poor quilter is hunting through a huge pile of quilts for the one she wants to talk about next? Or the people who are holding the quilts up hold something up and she goes, "Oh!" like she has never seen that quilt before and has no idea what she is going to say about it? My thoughts were collected, I handed the quilts to the two ladies who held them up, and I had my list so that I could quickly reacquaint myself if I had one of THOSE moments. (I didn't, but I did manage to call McKenna Ryan, Ryan McKenna - fortunately someone in the audience got me straightened out.)

My S.E.X. quilt was a hit. So I thought I would talk about it and share a photo... First talking. I used to belong to the Common Thread Quilt Guild in Ottawa, Ontario. It is a wonderful guild with all kinds of things going on to spur our creativity and imagination. One of the things is a yearly quilt challenge. I participated in three or four of them. This is how it would go. The Challenge committee would get a bolt or two of fabric and cut it into smallish pieces. There would usually be four or five fabrics of varying sizes in a brown paper bag, with the rules to the challenge INSIDE the bag. You would pay a small fee to join the challenge and you would get the fabric (sight unseen, I might add) and the rules. The resulting small quilt or wallhanging would be due in at the April meeting and in May the membership of the guild would vote for their favourite challenge quilt.

The S.E.X. Challenge was the Stash Enhancing eXperience Challenge. And we were to interpret that theme in any way we wanted. (There were prizes for the most different pieces of fabric in the quilt) All five of the fabrics in the bag had to appear in the quilt top, but any amount of other fabrics could be added and there was a maximum size.

I was the only one who created a quilt with the quilter having sex on a quilt. Her clothes, and his, are strewn around, however her handiwork is hung carefully on the tree. I had some lovely quilting fabric, and I fussy cut some appropriate pieces to cover up their salient points. Anyway, it was fun!

Here's the quilt:

It hangs in my Quilt Studio over the ironing board. The Guild also had a 9 Patch thing going on - so I thought the border (which had the 5 challenge fabrics in them, as well as in the picture) was a nice touch! The little quilt on the line is actually free motion quilted, but the blocks were not pieced... the clothespins are from Scrapbooking. The corners say things like the Joy of Quilting. And on their bottoms, the sign says, Do Not Disturb, Quilter at work! Seemed apropos somehow!!

Have fun!