History lesson

One of the reasons I am trying to move to Wordpress (yes it's taking a long time, yes I get it, I just can make it look cool yet! Yes I'm bummed) is because I hate that on blogger you can't return comments.

For instance if someone comments, they don't have to leave their email, so I can't respond personnally to their email, which I like to do, because it seems friendly and all. Anyway in response to several emails regarding the Mad Quilters, here is a little history lesson.


Talia, Cool Kelly, Mel, brit, Ren
December 2001, Ellensburg, Wa


Once upon a time there was a girl named brit, she went to visit her college roommate (Mel), Mel was having a party, she had invited some of her sorority friends over (keep in mind that Mel was kicked out of her sorority, for reasons you are to young to hear about). Mel invited Dr. Heather (who brit knew from rowing boats down the Snake River) and Cool Kelly, who brit didn't know from Adam.

Someone, (the details are blurry, it was a long time ago! and yes I like parenthesis!) said "I wanted to make a quilt out of old t-shirts I have" and I said "I did that!" Then I proceeded to tell how I had taken a quilting class after graduation, and was now an experiencedquilter. We suggested getting together once a month for quilting ( the fact that we lived 8hours apart, didn't slow us down....we were young, and independently wealthy...oh wait no.)

So we met at my house, Dr. Heather, Mel and I and this was sometime after 1997, because that was the year I graduated from college. Specific, I know. We started out, with me showing everyone how to piece a block. We each made the same square, in our own style.

In the following terrible picture we see the results of that effort.

We were able to talk Ama



into making a fourth block, then we had a drawing, Dr. Heather won, and we had a quilt group.

My sister decided she wanted to get involved, her and a friend (Talia) pieced the block as well and joined our group. Eventually they each finished a quilt with this pattern.



Ren's blue stars on the left and Talia's mult-colored stars on the right

Soon, Cool Kelly joined us and we found ourselves driving here and there all over the state. Our husbands referred to us as the Crazy quilters, but we insisted that we were Mad Quilters instead. And it stuck.

In June of 2003 we learned that Mel was moving to Chicago (out of driving distance) and then suddenly Cool Kelly left us for career oppurtunities in Texas (again with the driving distance thing). So I created the Mad Quilter's Monthly, published once a month, usually as close to the fifteenth as our get togethers are, to keep all Mad Quilters in the loops.

The Block of the month evolved from us all doing the same block and then drawing a name to, twelve months of doing your own blocks and making a quilt. I am currently picking the BOM's from different sources (see the BOM listed on sidebar for that patterns origin.

So there are the Mad Quilters in a nutshell.....nutty nutty nutshell.

posted by Anonymous at 3/02/2005 11:15:00 AM |