Friday, February 4, 2011

A Reunion of Quilting Friends!

When I was still in the "Gee, I might like to do that someday" stage of quilting, my best friend Mary Ponce and I joined the Santa Clarita Valley Quilt Guild at its inaugural meeting in March 1990. It's hard to believe it was that long ago!

A couple of years later, a few of the guild members -- I think there were five of us -- formed an informal mini-group devoted to art quilting and met once a month, usually at Paula Fleischer's house. We probably did that for at least a year or two and then we all got busy with our lives and I've pretty much lost touch with two of the women altogether.

So when I was invited to come to Paula's house for a potluck dinner to get together with her and Vicki Tymczyszyn, another of the "five", as well as a couple of friends we haven't known quite as long -- I was there! With a pan of brownies!

One of the reasons that we all wanted to do this was that Sam Hunter, a dear friend who I have known for several years now, had been living in Virginia for the past three years earning her Masters in Fine Arts degree from James Madison University. I was lucky enough to teach a couple of times at the quilt shop nearest to her, Patchwork Plus, and be able to get together with her for dinner or coffee each time, but it's not the same as having her back in California full time. Now she's back and Sunday was the first time I got to see her.

The fifth member of our group at dinner was Jake Finch, who is one of the most fun people in the world. She has a great sense of humor -- and she probably has to as she is one of the two co-editors of Quilter's Home magazine. Don't know that one could cope with deadlines and everything else that comes up without having a very ticklish funny bone!

Not everybody brought quilts to show, but I got a few pictures; unfortunately, not one of the group at dinner....


Vicki's been busy -- she loves piecing and has done some fun quick and easy's....


The hardest part of getting these pictures was getting Vicki to lower the quilts so they didn't cover her face!
















My favorite: Pink and Purple!




Paula showed us some of her hand embroidery -- she does such amazing things with little scraps of fabric and we tease her about it a lot...

















Her handwork is beautiful, but Paula has also taken up machine quilting and done some very cool things. I took some great pictures of some of her quilts when we were at lunch one day and I have to do a post very soon to share those with you.

Dinner was fun -- lots of laughs, stories and catching up to do. I had 5-8pm on my calendar, but was the first to leave at 10:30! I'm very excited that we're going to do it again in March -- there are some people that I don't ever ever want to lose touch with and these four quilter friends are definitely on that list!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...