I was invited by a new French friend here to go to Patchwork France's Moselle chapter for journée de l'amitié. We quilters find each other you know!
This is a meeting they do every quarter or so on a Saturday to bring quilters together. It is called "friendship day "and I was invited to go to the meeting as a guest. I was required to bring sewing supplies and some fabric and if I had it my latest projects to bring that for show and tell. Well, I don't really have projects here yet, but I do have the bag I made in the Sulky training last November. I brought that to show. Showing meant that you placed it in one of the designated show areas so that people could go by and look at them and take pictures.
Observation about French Quilting guilds is that if it were not for the language it is literally the same. The women look the same! They meet to do group projects though not to have a classic guild meeting. Tables were set up and there were about 50 women in attendance. Everything had to be done by hand because of the nightmare of logisitcally how they would have the power to be able to run sewing machines. We did mini patches in the afternoon and "inchies" in the morning. This was new to me, but look at
I have not mentioned the food! Everyone (except clueless guests like me) were asked to bring food. either "salty" or "sweet" that meant we started with coffee cake type things in the morning with coffee and then lunch was salads and main courses people had brought, followed by cheese and then desserts...more coffee. I needed to bring my own knife, folk spoon and plate as well as anything I was going to drink besides coffee.
I was already pretty popular due to the sweater I was wearing that the French thought was really really nice (they took pictures) and checked the construction. I bought it at Talbots a couple years ago. It is orange/yellow/green crochet squares all sewn together. It zips up the front. I was also wearing a pair of green embroidered jeans that I had actually done the embrodery on (more pictures and questions as to how I got it so nicely on the leg),
But then sometime mid afternoon there was a group of women walking around with my bag in their hand inquiring at each table if they knew who made the bag. My friend saw what was happening and asked me "Isn't that your bag?" Well yes it was so I was literally grabbed by this mob of women and sat down off to the side discussing in German (I do not speak French yet, with Elizabeth there to translate French where German did not work) on how the bag was constructed. It was a big hit. They wanted to understand the thread mostly as well as how the tree trunk was constructed. How did I get that background there and is that metallic thread and how do you use it? My next trip home I am going to have to bring back puffy foam and 12/30 weight blendables to show the ladies what I am talking about and how it can be done. Working with the small interested group I would not mind teaching them. They are very interested in learning how to use the threads and stabilizers. I never thought I would be teaching in France,
The woman who is president for the Mosele chapter insisted that I join (I did - 40 euros - comes with a real nice magazine, in french of course that looks a lot like the AQS magazine) and later she wants me to come back and teach fabric painting. That was a whole different topic that came up. This and I do not speak French yet. I think I was the most popular person in the room. Go figure! All I was going to do was go and quietly watch.
Jean