Almanac Quilt pattern available at www.theinventionclub.com
We had just gotten home from QuiltCon 2020 in Austin, Texas in February when the world turned upside down. Quarantine. Telework. Face masks. Isolation. Words that used to belong to disaster movies became part of everyday vocabulary almost overnight.
We made over 700 masks that spring, and we’re still making them now, though not with the all-consuming urgency of those first few months. I worked from home for almost three months, and honestly, it was hard to tell where work life ended and home life began — the sewing room, the laptop, and the kitchen table all blurred into one long, strange stretch of days.
Somewhere in the middle of that, we joined Edyta Sitar’s mystery quilt-a-long. I remember thinking, “Will we get this done before this is over?” Wishful thinking, as it turns out. It’s been more than six months since our new normal started, and here we still are.
The shows disappeared one by one. I had an entry in the Lancaster show that had to be shipped back, unseen by the crowds it was made for. Our local guild show was cancelled, along with our regular meetings. And our annual trek to the Houston Festival in October — a trip we look forward to all year — was abandoned too.
It’s a strange kind of grief, losing the events that structure a quilting year. But quilters are resilient, and it turns out the internet can accomplish a lot.
Virtual quilt shows started popping up. Our guild moved meetings to Zoom so we could stay connected. Support poured in from quilters, shop owners, and instructors worldwide, all figuring out how to adapt in real time — online sales, curbside pickup, online classes, and a whole lot more Facebook Live than any of us had used before.
Industry leaders got personally involved, too. Scott Fortunoff, President of Free Spirit Fabrics and an executive at Jaftex, hosted twenty weekly trivia contests just to give away fabric bundles. We never won a single one, but it was genuinely fun watching people tune in from all over the world to play together, if only for an hour.
Since 2020 also marked my 50th birthday — still can’t quite believe it — I decided to do something about it. I set out to support quilt shops by buying from fifty different ones over the year, and, to make things interesting, to piece fifty quilt tops in 2020. Just the tops. They don’t have to be quilted by year’s end; that felt like a fair compromise given, well, everything.
After a proper period of self-pity over a cancelled river cruise in Europe, and once my work schedule settled back into something reasonable, we got moving. We’re putting together a quilt top every day or so now, with four or five projects going at once so there’s always something to pick up. We’re also trying to keep to fifteen minutes a day, inspired by Victoria Findlay Wolfe’s “fifteen minutes of play” motto — a small, achievable goal on days when a full sewing session just isn’t in the cards.
Mom spends her days sewing or out in the garden when it’s cool enough. I use my after-work hours to cut pieces for her to sew, and to work on the longarm — quilting the mystery quilt I designed. As of August 6th, I’ve already put twenty-two hours and nearly a million stitches into it. I’ve started adding some intense fills, and I suspect it’ll take another twenty hours before it’s done.
We’ve been fortunate that our area has handled the virus reasonably well, and most people here wear masks without complaint. Fabric has never been the problem — we have plenty of that to keep us going for a long while yet.
What we miss is our friends. The ones we only see at shows, the ones whose faces we associate with certain fabric lines or certain booths we always visit together. We hope they’re weathering this storm too, and that they’ll be there when we can all finally gather again.
Until then, I’ll be at the virtual shows, on Zoom with the guild, and — as always — quilting, quilting, quilting.
— Debbie