Friday
January 11th
2008

Off the Bookshelf: Help! I Married a Quilter

I’m sure that I’m totally behind all of you quilters who live in the States, since your LQS probably had this book quite some time ago (like years, right?), but I finally got my hands on this book! Help! I Married a Quilter by Mark Hyland is a hilarious look at The Quilter’s life from the poor, put upon husband’s point of view. A friend from the quilt guild shared her (husband’s) copy with me last summer, and I thought I’d order it for my husband for Christmas, and then I forgot (my bad ). Hey, better late than never, right?

When my (husband’s) copy arrived in the mail, I put it on the table next to his place so he’d see it and he could read it. I mean, I was trying to help him out, see? There it sat, for days. I finally decided I’d read the dang thing myself, since the bits I’d seen last summer were roll-on-the-floor funny. Mark Hyland has been married to The Quilter for 17 years (at time of writing), so he’s had quite a bit of experience with things like The Stash, Block-of-the-Month quilts, monthly quilt meetings, hauling bolts of fabric to the cutting table at the quilt shop, visiting quilt shops while on “vacation,” etc. He exposes Quilters’ quirks and our secret language, and what it’s really like to live with a Quilter.

He thinks he’s got a lot of it all figured out, but I note that having it figured out hasn’t helped him much. He draws on his experience as The Quilter’s spouse to create this definitive reference guide for spouses of Quilters, imparting words of wisdom and tips and tricks for preventing quilting from completely taking over the house and life, and a quiz to determine if it’s already to late and the spouse is a “GONER.”

After I devoured the book and laughed myself silly, I decided that the reason ITMan hadn’t bothered to pick up the book and read it was that he could already tell (without taking the quiz and seeing the points add up and break the scale) that it’s much too late for prevention. In fact it’s been too late for years, and he’s already a GONER.