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!

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Our sleepy little town of 5,000 woke up and partied all weekend, and continues to party today since it’s Whit Monday here in Germany. We’ve discovered that there are advantages and disadvantages to living three blocks from the local castle.

The great part is that we’re able to walk to the fests that take place on the castle grounds, like the Angelbachtaler Pfingstmarkt that’s been going on all weekend. We were treated to fireworks on Saturday night, and we didn’t even have to leave the house for a great view! It was really the best view of fireworks we’ve had in years.

(Note: I didn’t take these pics. They came from the brochure for the fest, since the pics I tried to take of the fireworks didn’t turn out well, and an aerial view of the castle is quite beyond my capacity…I also forgot to take my camera when we wandered over to the fest for lunch on Sunday, my bad. I do tend to be quite lame when it comes to pictures…the brochure is great though, even if you can’t read German, since there are lots of pictures of the fest and the goings on.)

After ITMan fixed waffles for breakfast for Mother’s day, we all went to the fest for lunch. The girls promptly disappeared to ride the ferris wheel, and we headed for the food tents. The local associations and clubs provide food and drink for the fest, and we discovered that the tennis club makes very good Schupfnudel mit Sauerkraut (my favorite fest food: potato noodles with sauerkraut and bacon or sausage bits, or both which is even better), and some yummy cakes and tarts as well.

We passed on the nighttime festivities at the castle, which included a music and laser light show, not being so in the mood for crowds and figuring we could always catch it next year. It would have been a pretty late night for all of us, since Monday wasn’t a day off for Americans of course, but we probably should have just gone anyway since as it was, we heard the whole thing loud and clear, which would be one of those disadvantages to living so close! The other downside would be the traffic: it seemed like every single fest-going car full of people parked on the streets in our neighborhood, or tried to at least. It was quite the full house.

The girls are headed back over there today for lunch, since they fell in love with the pizza they had on Sunday. Maybe I’ll have them bring back some more Schupfnudel mit Sauerkraut for me!

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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.

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