Look who’s here:

Kimberly came to visit last week, and we had a blast! We quilted (a little), shopped (a bit), ate (lunch and pastries), and gabbed (a lot)! She brought me a pile of goodies:

How cool! There’s Kimberly’s Easy Hearts cutting template, a nifty little rotary cutter to go with it, her Easy Star & Geese ruler, and a Simplicity apron pattern. How awesome is it that she has a Simplicity pattern with her name all over it?? And the best part:

She brought me my very own copy of her book, Quilt a Travel Souvenir, and signed as well! I’m much more of an armchair traveler than most, and I really enjoyed reading about her European travel experiences that inspired the quilts in the book. It’s truly a beautiful book, with such creative, yummy quilts! I’ve already planned a quilt using the Easy Star & Geese Ruler, and the Easy Hearts template may have inspired something as well.

Kimberly and I have decided to make this quilt/eat/shop/gab thing a regular happening every couple of weeks or so. I don’t expect we’ll run out of things to talk about, that’s for sure! The problem might be actually getting anything quilting-related done while we’re together! Which isn’t really a problem, after all. I’m sure Shadow will be pleased:

What is it with this cat?? He totally charmed Kimberly, by only showing his cute, calm, lovable side while she was here. Everyone who visits thinks he’s just precious and such a good kitty! They obviously don’t know the real Shadow, since he’s always on his best behavior for guests. Sheesh. He did steal Kimberly’s chair the moment she got up, of course, but that only endeared him to her even more it seemed. Hmphf. I’m sure his true nature will out eventually! Patches played least in sight, being the big, fat chicken cat that he is. Maybe Kimberly will get to see him at some point after she’s come around a few times. He’s the true cute one, after all.

Kimberly treated me much too grandly while she was here, I must say! “Thank you” just doesn’t quite cover it! We had such a great time, and I can’t wait to do it again in a couple of weeks!

Share This

Life is funny sometimes. Since my friend Dawn left nearly three years ago, there hasn’t really been anyone close by that I hang out with or quilt with regularly. During one of our last outings just before she moved, we joked that I should put an ad in the paper for a new best friend, something like “Wanted: New best friend; must like quilting, shopping, chocolate and long telephone chats. No small kids. Cat lover a bonus, transportation not required.”

It’s been a pretty dry three years since then. I did feel a connection with Kristin, but she lived in Heidelberg, and we didn’t really have the time to get together again after our quilt day, and then she was on her way out of the Heidelberg area just as soon as I got here. There have been other quilting friends here and there, but not anyone that I could say I had a real connection with.

Quilt a Travel Souvenir,
by Kimberly Einmo

Enter Kimberly Einmo. Oddly enough, she used to live in Ramstein, and we met briefly when she was teaching quilting classes in Stuttgart years ago. I watched her quilting career with interest; she wrote Quilt a Travel Souvenir, a great book of quilts and patterns inspired by her European travels while she lived in Germany. She’s back here in Germany now and living in Stuttgart, arriving just after I moved from Stuttgart to Heidelberg. Go figure.

Actually, we can blame the timing of all this on our respective husbands: ITMan was just leaving the company in Stuttgart just as Kimberly’s husband was going to work for the same company, and Kimberly’s husband would have been ITMan’s boss had we stayed in Stuttgart! Perhaps the men knew they shouldn’t get us together, because we’ll probably help each other spend money. Well, not that we really need any help with that, I’m sure.

We decided to get together last Tuesday, and it was just the most fun day! We have so much in common, I feel like I have a quilting sister already. And it’s not just quilting things we have in common either, it’s bunches of other things as well. We had so much to talk about that we couldn’t really finish a subject and say what we wanted to say before we were sidetracked by the next thing and off on another tangent. Kimberly has many of those “best friend” requirements from the ad that Dawn and I joked about: likes quilting, shopping, cats, has older kids, and doesn’t care if I always drive. I don’t know about the chocolate or phone chats yet, but I suspect she can deal with those as well.

By lunchtime, we’d decided that there would be many quilting days together in our future, and we’d just alternate back and forth between our studios in Stuttgart and Heidelberg to meet. Kimberly is teaching classes at the first AQS Quilt Expo in Des Moines, Iowa in October, and since I’ve been wanting to get to a quilt convention soon anyway, I decided to go to Des Moines with her. By Wednesday, I had our airline tickets in my hand! Look out Des Moines, here we come!

Share This

Pfft—where did that come from anyway?

I’m not a “scraps” kind of gal, preferring to work with big chunks of fabric when I make quilts, instead of the little oddly shaped leftover bits and pieces filling up the many assorted containers all over my house. When I start a new project, I first go big stash hunting, pulling out at many yardage sized bundles as I can find to create the perfect palette for the idea in my head. When the Big Stash has produced it’s last hopeful candidate, I go to the Little Stash of fat quarters stored in tubs and the process begins all over again. If the palette is still lacking in sufficient variety of color or pattern or amount, I head to the local quilt shop, dragging whatever I’ve already chosen hoping to add to it from the vast selection usually on display there.

Whoever wrote [that] may have intended it as a metaphor of life, but it’s not my metaphor.

Then come the Google searches, and the email and phone calls to friends near and far, in an ever widening and more desperate search for just the right fabrics to make the project successful, let alone make it sing. Way, way down on the list of possibilities are the boxes, bags, buckets, bins and baskets of scraps that bear silent testimony to the quilting projects of the last 18 plus years.

During (infrequent) moments of decluttering and purging unused “stuff” from the house and our lives, I consider taking these space hogging fabric bits straight to the local youth center or Girl Scout camp, secure in the knowledge that the leftovers would be put to good use. Perhaps it’s an unconscious, perverse desire to make a true scrap quilt someday, maybe it’s just a completely unreasonably fear that a fabric depression will soon envelop the entire quilting industry, or possibly when I open the containers to see what’s inside, I see the scattered bits of projects long past and just can’t bear to part with the last little bit of the perfect fabrics, but the bits and pieces of quilting fabrics always end up finding their way back to their secret locations in the house, there to remain forever crumpled. Read the rest of this entry »

Share This