Fibermania

Forty Years

My friend Emily is having her fortieth birthday today and is having a contest (go enter!) which invites the reader to leave a comment to commemorate the day.

I am having a hard time remembering when I was forty, even tho it was only 19 years ago. The mind remembers the fabulous times and the very icky times, but the bland times don't have the same sticking power.

I guess I was coasting that year...with a dull icky job, in a crummy neighborhood, wondering whatever would become of me. I thought I would have 'made it' by 30 and here I was already 40 and nothing had happened. I had not yet started dyeing fabric. Hadn't met Laura Wasilowski, who was to become my business partner for years, and had not yet gotten my free ride to graduate school. Everything was just about to happen, but it was all invisible on the dark edges of my future.

What would make it all come together? Fate or a Grand Master Plan?

A series of mysterious events occured. I was making quilts. I had no quilting friends, or friends of any kind. None. Zero.

I went alone or with my mother to local quilt shows. I saw magazines with art quilts in them. I felt a connection. I wanted to make stuff like Michael James and Nancy Crow and Caryl Fallert.

I knew nothing.

I found out about Japanese quilts from books at quilt shows. I saw an article about a Japanese man who dyed his own fabric. I tried dyeing with Rit. In the microwave (not a good idea, but hey, it worked for a while).

I decided to find a quilt guild. I would join and meet someone. Anyone. I was very isolated and lonely. I did find a quilt guild. I did enter their show which was like a month after I joined. I had a surplus of quilts and entered, uh, like eleven. This did not endear me to the group. I was considered a pushy upstart. My quilts were not regular, or bed things. O boy. I won several prizes, but not friends.

But I kept trying and soon I met someone (Zelig) who belonged to another guild besides mine and took me to a meeting to see Caryl Fallert give a lecture. On the way we stopped to pick up her friend, Laura Wasilowski.

Click click click. Bing!

Not that Laura liked me immediately or even soon. But it was fate or The Grand Master Plan unfolding itself.

I could go on to recount the next series of events or several years of miracles that followed, but the real story is that sometimes we just don't know what tomorrow will bring. One must take a step, move forward and reach out to get what is waiting...it takes just a step of faith.