I Lived a Dream

A week ago, I was honored to be the Guest Speaker at the Lodi Valley Quilter’s Guild meeting.  I’ve been wanting to write about the experience for a week now and I’m finally just doing it!  Anyway –   I filled in fairly last minute for our scheduled speaker and had very little time to prepare.  I think in the end this turned out to be a good thing.  This speaking gig was my first ever speaking gig to talk about quilting.  I was nervous, excited, and flabbergasted to be asked.  When folks ask me  what I want to do when I grow up my response is always ‘I want to be famous’.  Well – giving talks and showing my work is definitely a good step towards that dream!

I managed to scrounge up one of my very first quilts for the ‘trunk show’ portion of the talk.  It’s always nice to show everyone where you started and how far you’ve come in the years.  As you can see from this picture – this quilt has been used a lot and I may not have chosen the best fabrics for a quilt…My friend Trish was one of my quilt holding helpers for the talk.  Her advice for the show was to just focus on one thing instead of the seventeen I’m usually focused on.  This was great advice and worked for most of the talk – but of course, I had a few important tangents I had to go off on.My friend Karne was another one of my quilt holder helpers for the show and she also helped me be more relaxed and slow down when I needed to.  It was great to have two lovely ladies up there with me. 

I started the show with one of my first quilts so I had to end the show with the last one I’ve finished – my scrappy trip along. 

As I was putting together the order I would show  my quilts I thought it was pretty ironic that my first quilt was a square patchwork and my last one was a square patchwork sort…

Another friend of mine took pictures throughout the show of my different pieces that I talked about.  I don’t want to post too much of them at this time though because I hope to be asked to do this for more groups and guilds.  Yes – I was nervous for the talk but it turned out that I absolutely LOVED every minute I was up there.  It was such a good rush!  The feedback I got from the crowd as I talked just fed the energy I had during the presentation and from what I heard after the talk the crowd also enjoyed it.

My talk is about an hour and I can easily add to or shorten this to your groups desire.  The hour I talked focused on three things:

1. my journey as a quilter – including some of my very first quits
2. how challenges have shaped the quilter I’m becoming
3. my addiction to quilt along’s and/or ‘Block of the Months’

If you would like to  have me talk to your group about my ‘Quilting Journey’ feel free to contact me by email:  lapaceksorchard {at} gmail {dot} com or give me a call 608-635-4780.

 

PS – I did not make my dress…it’s from Desigual.