Old Lady Problems With Young Hot Quilters
There’s a story coming, hope you enjoy a teachable moment.
If you cruise instagram, pinterest (there goes an hour) or facebook like I do, you’ll notice that some of the quilts you love have a hot young quilter in the picture. At first I thought younger people didn’t even like quilting, boy was I wrong.
You know that question we ask at quilt guild or quilt shows “how long have you been quilting?” I normally hear the response “I’ve been quilting for 20, 30, 40, 50 years or so”. As I look at all these younger quilters, I have to remind myself that since I started quilting 40+ years ago, these young quilters are just on track doing the same thing.
The story:
My Mother was a proud and prominent member of a well-known service organization for decades. She and her girlfriends ran the joint; they cooked, planned parties, planned fundraisers, performed leadership duties along with bossing everyone around.
She complained to me that “young people just don’t want to join our organization”. Apparently, she and her girlfriends would work very hard to show the new recruits around and sign them up for “duties”. I probed further into this mention of “duties” just to get an idea of what was going on. My Mother complained that she would “instruct” the new recruits on exactly how to set up tables, organize the cooking duties, and do the cleanup. Knowing my Mother, I had a pretty clear picture of how this “instruction” was carried out.
My Way or The Highway
I think that was the moto for the girlfriends that ran the organization. They were rarely open to new ideas and would chastise new recruits at meetings saying things like “we don’t do it that way, period”.
Lesson 1: Be open to new ideas, you just might learn something
Lesson 2: When I say hot young quilters, I mean people in their 30’s, 40’s and even 50’s
I used to be young, wear makeup, dye my hair and wear something besides flannel shirts. Those days are over, I’ve now found that wearing yoga sweatpants is just fine for my work as a quilt pattern writer.
I love checking out new modern quilts and love the stories I read from quilters of every age. I find inspiration and “permission” to step out of my historical style and try some new things.
Wanda
