Each time we have a speaker at our guild meeting, you can overhear friends huddled afterwards talking about the “mad skills” the speaker has. It may be expertise in machine quilting, hand appliqué, color, or design…..it doesn’t matter. We highly respect and admire their experience and skill.

The next thing you overhear is…..”I could never do that”. Someone asks if you signed up for the workshop the next day, and we reply “no, I’d be so intimidated”. So what we are saying is we have to already be highly skilled in a technique to take a class? Now I’m confused…….we can’t take a class because we aren’t good enough? Isn’t that the point?

I am not a spokesperson for MODA but I do enjoy their daily posts. Today’s asks some of today’s well-known quilt design names what intimidates them. Yes, highly skilled quilters can be intimidated and insecure just like us. Each have different issues.

I find all this fascinating because one thing I’ve observed with fellow quilters/sewists is…everyone is SOOOOO willing to help another quilter by sharing techniques or knowledge. Someone at a bee, a class or retreat yells 911, and immediately you’ll be swarmed by the quilting paramedics helping you resolve your problem. Thread tension, needle problems, corners don’t match, can’t get the pattern to work, the color is awful……what did I do wrong? Help! We rush to the rescue (perhaps too eagerly sometimes, but forgive us for that….we only want you to get “unstuck”).

Give a sewist a bunch of fabric scraps and they’ll whip up a quilt. Give them a problem and they’ll figure out how to solve it. Someone else has a problem and we will run thru fire to save them. Bottom line ……quilters are a lot like superwoman!

Happy quilting!

Barb Schippa

BRQG member and blog contributor