Not long ago I had the opportunity to attend a great workshop about sewing great quilt binding and other neat quilting tips. The presenters name was Eileen Wardle and what a delight she turned out to be.. Her first statement in the workshop was that she wanted to lecture on the quilting circuit and so this was her first lecture and we were her test audience. Not to worry though, she was marvelous. She came prepared with great visual and timely handouts. Turns out she really does know her bindings and then we discovered she was the ultimate gadget girl. Let me digress here a little bit. I am usually not a workshop person. I rarely sign up for them. Because frankly my creative side is always in control and it is hard for me to sit in one location for very long. I am literally always creating in my head which is hard on my attention span. Anyway I went because my good friend had booked her after we were discussing what would be some of the roadblocks to entering our quilts in competitions. Maybe it would be the fear of our bindings being marked down amongst other things. So I had to attend to save face. There was a lot of timely information about the bindings of course but I think I enjoyed her gadgets talk best. She was so passionate about gadgets that guess what, I have been looking at quilting gadgets ever sense. The other thing I noticed about her was her ability to go with the flow even when she got off track. That is hard to do when you first give a lecture because you are so nervous. I remembered the first time I gave a presentation to our local quilt guild several years ago. There was probably 60 or 70 women there and I was so nervous I started giggling. I had to stop several times to get control of my giggles to finish my talk. I was so sure I messed up. Well as it turns out they didn’t notice because my art quilts spoke for themselves. I know she is going to go along way in her new adventure because she is a natural at it. I can’t wait to attend her next one. Thank so much Elaine…….
