Gloating

Booking for Festival of Quilts opened today at midday. So, was I at my computer, fingers poised, credit card ready? Um no. I was on a podium in a conference venue at London Gatwick airport talking about Forced Marriages. Arrgh! Not that the show sells out - you can pay on the day. And the lectures don't sell out either - the auditorium is pretty big. ( I know. I shared a stage there once with Ricky Tims. Ok, he was on it at Festival and I was on it a week earlier talking to lawyers about enforcing contact orders, but still...!)

So why the panic? Because the workshops sell pretty quickly. Which is where having a retired husband is handy. (I just asked him if he preferred to be called retired or stay at home. He requests 'Major Domo'). I left him a detailed list of requests from me and Best Quilting Buddy Lesley and strict instructions to go online at midday prompt.

Being scared by the frenzied look which no doubt accompanied this instruction he went on at ten to midday 'for a dry run to check my route'. Horror - booking was open early and, deducing from the varying numbers of tickets left Other People had been buying. In a sweat he began to frantically click and search the diary. Meanwhile I am trying to be entertaining about changes to child maintenance and looking at the little clock on the lectern and crossing my fingers that all will be well. I finish. I switch on the mobile phone. No signal. I fight past two hundred delegates to the Hilton Hotel restaurant. Still no signal. I go up to the lobby. No flippin' signal. I go outside and there, with Boeing 777's thundering overhead I get the message:

"All systems go,go,go. I hope.Love you."

He hopes????

I ring. He is smug. Since he sent the text not only has the confirmation come through that in fact he did not foul up but also he has been back on the booking system and the three workshops we booked are already sold out. Crazy! And people think quilters are sweet old ladies who make patchwork tea cosies for their great nieces. Imagine the cyber-fighting-at-the door-of-the -January-sales that must have been going on! Anyway this is how come a show that costs £10 to get into is going to cost me more than a family holiday in Europe.

I shall - as you might have guessed from the illustrations - be going down to Birmingham early to do a two day workshop with Sandra Meech pre-show called Connecting Art to Stitch. So that's six nights hotel then. During the show we both get to do a three hour workshop Create and Colour with Clare Martin where we play with different product and an hours slot with Laura Kemshall. Plenty of the four days left for shopping and shopping, ahem, I mean looking at quilts and - um, shopping ( make that a family holiday in the Maldives) together with a lecture on design from Magie Grey, a lecture on Egyptian Quiltmakers by Jenny Bowker and a session on embroidering on water soluble film. With dancing one evening and the company of a wonderful and entertaining friend... I can't wait.

PS. Does anyone need a lecture on Forced Marriage any time this year? I have bills to pay!

Vintage fair / blog comment response

Today I went to the Antique Textile Fair in Manchester. I expected a kind of V&A store room sell off but it was more like a giant jumble sale! However, my coat got lots of attention and admiration. The nice ladies from Black Cat Books voted it the best garment they had seen all day. I bought this book off them in response.

I will never ever have the patience to make a perfect quilt to win a show but I don't care if I keep turning round and stumbling over people who apologise for following me but ' we just wanted to see how you made it..!"

Now, I love getting comments on my blog, but don't often respond - sometimes they don't require one, other time I am just bad. But two recent ones inspire a reply.

First, on my complaint that I can't tell left from right and am therefore a lousy person to take driving directions from, Melusine says,

"If passenger is sitting on the left hand side of the car and the driver sits on the right, then the passenger navigates by saying "my side" if you want them to turn left and "your side" when you want them to turn right.Trust me, this works. I learnt it from a driver friend who can't tell her left from her right. It is also easy to use if you are in a country where the driver is seated on the left hand side. "

I agree - this ought towork. However I actually know when I need to go left and in my head I say left but the word that comes out of my mouth is right. So when we tried this all that happened was that I'd think 'my side' and say 'your side'!

Then, Jennifer asked whether my leg is OK and about my garment making history. For the benefit of others the leg question relates to the fact I that I had a trip in a hotel on a dangerous ( in my view!) lip to some laminate flooring, fell smack onto an adjacent tiled floor area and took a right bang to my right leg. I had to sit on the floor for a while and then on a chair with a costa coffee footstool for a while before I could stand on it and while we waited for an ambluance. I was right by the lifts and everyone was so British, averting their gaze and not questioning why I was there!

I can walk on it but it is still stiff and bending my heel up to my backside is not a good idea. Putting socks on is bizarely quite hard. I can also tell you that crouching at an angle to access the bottom of my design board is an instinctive but highly painful movement. The first time I did it I screamed and Dennis came running. The second time ( 'coz I never learn!) I screamed but the rugby was on and there was no response at all!

As for garment making - no, I have not been dong it under the radar. I made a very badly finished skirt once, which I only ever wear to quilt shows where other arty people go! (it's long and swishy and I fear too flamboyant for normal wear although others disagree) And a black shift dress which I have never worn at all because I don't like the neck line. Then the coat. I know that I will never get a tailoring finish as good as I could buy so I am only interested in garments as a base to embellish with one off design ideas really. Oh and to get attention!

On stashbusting

{I apologise for the length and silliness of this post ..., I got carried away!)



I have discovered that there is an invidious cult like group around called Stashbusters. They seem like normal people. Their blogs are wholesome and show cute babies and snuggly quilts. They have a button that looks like any other button and their doctrines as portrayed on their blogs look mainstream. They have bought a lot of fabric and they want to use it up. They want to support and encourage each other to do that. What nice, responsible people. When I first found them I thought, yeah, I'd like to join them.



But, lets look at their real doctrine. Not the stuff they are peddling door to door. The real theology as written in their Yahoo Newsletter group statement. Even that starts relatively anodine. Just a subtle shift from their blog statement about making quilts out of their stash. It begins:



"The purpose of this group is to support those quilters who wish to cut down on spending for one year, and reduce their stashes....."



but read on.

"You can join and start "not buying" anytime during the year..."



Not Buying? Now that sounds to me like it fits the definition of a cult I found online :



"A group generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional manner.....Obsessive, especially faddish, devotion to or veneration for a person, principle"



I mean how many quilters don't buy? And not buying for a year. If that is not 'especially faddish' I don't know what is. So I thought it my duty to warn you to resist the false teachings of this group.



Their gospel sounds perfectly plausible, laudable even. They are right that you have bought lots of fabric that is sitting in your cupboard. Enough that you could quilt for years without buying more. You are more a fabric collector than a quilter. You are hoarding the stuff. Hear those sibilant arguments seducing you into joining them. Or, if you push it, watch them move to threats of dire consequences if you ignore them. That fabric is going to kill you. It will fall on you and smother you. OK, OK, you cry. I want to live. I repent my hasty purhases of Moda jelly rolls and Loni Rossi Fat Quarter packs. I believe.



But lets take this to the logical conclusion. You sew up all your fabric and then what? You don't have any left. So what are you going to do? Sigh, and turn to trainspotting for a hobby? No, you are going to go shopping and create a new stash. But before you do that you are going to go through the pains of de-programming. You are going to have shaking hands, which long for somthing soft ( or crinkly or silky) to stroke, you are going to have headaches from carrying around half baked ideas for quilts in your heard that you cannot translate to planned projects. You are going to suffer.



And don't let them con you that you will find the succour of companionship in their midst. Because whilst you sit at home trying to find a way to get your neon blue spacemen novelty fabric to fit with the Liberty Lawns, your real friends are out draping cottons at the local quilt shop and razzing it up, bags a-bulging at the international shows.



So what do the leaders of this invidious movement stand to gain from sucking you into their schemes? I believe a careful examination of their practices reveals all. I found a blog testimonay recently in which a senior group member praised a neophyte for managing, for the very first time, to delete emails advertising fabric sales without even reading them. Thats it! The Ring leaders are simply out to beat us to the sales. It is a fabric grab!



But getting rid of a cult is not that easy. I bet, even as you read this, a little voice on your shoulder is saying, "Ha, funny. But you know, I do have quite a big stash. Maybe I should join the ring..." See, that's how cults work. They start with a good point, a legtimate premise and present a flawed solution to it. So the best way to combat them is to find the true solution to the stash issue. To that end, I commend to you the concept of..... Stash Rotation.



Here is a parable from the Book of Stash Rotation

Once there were two farmers. Both of them had one more field than they needed. The foolish farmer decided to use up the field and built a log cabin on it with courthouse steps leading up to it and dormer attic windows. The first year he was warm and snug in his house and he bragged to his neighbour farmer that he had made good use of his field and had no need to replace it because he had an heirloom house with a label on the back for good measure. The wise farmer however, just kept his field empty. Everynow and again he would go and rub his palm over the soft grass growing there. In the second year he did the same whilst the foolish farmer took another of his fields and built a Schoolhouse block on it. The wise farmer went out and bought another field that he didn't really need but, becuase the grass in this field was so soft he preferred to stroke this crop and started to use his previously empty field. In the third year the foolish farmer decided that he could live on even less food and decided to build a railfence around another of his fields and donate it to charity. The wise farmer bought another field and started to use last year's field. In the fourth year the foolish farmer's crops began to fail. He paid an international field teacher to appraise his fields. The teacher looked at them through a reducing glass then took an arial photo in black and white.

"Oh Dear," she said, "you have value blight. You have failed to renew your fields. You should let one or two lie fallow so that when you need the hue or tones found deep in the soil they are available to you. That is why your fields have lots their vitality and become monocromatic and inspid. You should be like the wise farmer who rotated his fields, using some new and some old and always keeping a range of hues and values available in his soil."

The foolish famer wept and rent his clothes but yea, he was still low on fields. The wise farmer however, having to fund all these fields was also working overtime as a Good Samaritan and, seeing the foolish farmer in need of half a meter of hedgerow did donate it to him as, in truth, the foolish farmer was not evil but, as I have been saying all long, only foolish.



And so, my recommendation is that you by all means use your stash but that you replace what you use. Because quilting is about fabric as much as it is about sewing which is why we do not have stashes of plain white cottons to make duvet covers with. If you really do have too much of the stuff then by all means make quilts a little quicker than you replace but do not let your stash dwindle to the uglies and the unmatchable. After all, you may well need a sofa sized stack of fat quarters to hide behind when the pair of clean cut white shirted Stashbusters come to the door to sell you a copy of FabricTower.........





{To all members of Stashbusters. Do not sue me. (a) this is a spoof (b) being a professional I can sue better than you can and (c) I really did want to join you but then I started to hyperventilate at the thought of not being able to shop for a year ....}

Thinking persons blog

It transpires that I have in fact been tagged before. Purple Missus put me on her site as one of Five Bloggers who Make you think. Only she didn't tel lme and I got caught out not reading hers! In my defence because I travel so much I do tend to have blogfests when I curl up and read all the back issues as it were. (Am I forgiven?!)

I was particularly pleased when she said
"It reminds me very much of the penultimate page in a lot of magazines where someone writes a column each issue with their view on life in general" because thats exactly what I was aiming for with the blog.
But talk about pressure - what can I get you to think about today?

Well, how about words since I am a writer.

Yesterday I went to Craftsand Quilts in Southport and had the usual conversation about how I didn't need anythng, how I'd just popped in for a cup of tea while I was in the region and how I really didn't need anything but could she just cut me a FQ from all those nine bolts on the counter. Driving away, I was pondering how we all talk about being addicted to fabric.

I had a whole blog mapped out about how we do ourselves a diservice calling it an addiction. I was going to write about how we ought to allow ourselves to declare that beauty and creativity are a necessary part of life and not somthing to be ashamed about. I was going to write that we should not equate fabric buying with the consumption of illegal and socially unacceptable substances.

But then I went on line to get a definition of addiction and found these:

'Compulsive physiological and psychological need for a habit-forming substance'
'an intense desire for some particular thing'
'given over to'

So now my thesis ought to be that we should rehabilitate the word and disassociate it from concepts of ill health and theft.

Or I could stick with my original proposal which was that we all start to declare that 'fabric is our passion' or that 'I am fulfilled by textile arts'.

Either way one thing I am sure of (to steal from Oprah's magazine back column) - as long as you are not getting into debt and are not harming yousrelf or your family - buying fabric is not a bad and shameful thing.