Edinburgh Modern Quilt Guild

      Lockdown blues (part one)

Hi everyone. The blog has been on a bit of an extended holiday, so i thought i'd start with a look back at the strangest 6 months any of us has ever experienced 

March 2020

           

So, here we go then. The world, as we know it, has gone mad. The guild has been overtaken by a manic hilarity, as if the realisation of what is happening hasn't quite got through yet. Queue the Sew Social What'sApp group. Started as a distraction from outside, we would talk about quilting, sewing, knitting, etc. Mainly at the beginning we talked about toilet roll. Jokes about toilet roll, videos about toilet roll, a toilet roll quilt and a constant running update on supplies in nearest supermarkets. Everyone had good intentions about how they would use their time productively-yoga, gardening, finishing all our WIPs (although for some members of the group this would have required lockdown to have lasted into the next decade..) and the funny pictures, videos and jokes continued. And then it all started to sink in. We had people who were shielding with their whole family, and there were no delivery slots to be had. Everybody rallied round, picking up stuff, dropping it at each others' front doors. Sewing became a way to distract from the outside. Online shopping became our new hobby. A new type of show and tell became the norm-

And then we decided that we would all make a video of our sewing spaces. There's nothing quite as good as seeing who's got a better sewing machine/bigger stash/better view than you. It was fascinating to see how these people we thought we knew, lived. We learned many things-

Who lied about not having tidied up first

Who wasn't fessing up to all of their stash

The fact that Juliet seems to have spread her sewing space across most of the rooms in her house

That what Liz calls a "filing system" is known by the rest of us as a "pile"

Suzanne is trying for a Guinness world record for the most crafts stuffed into one room

Then  normal sewing went on hold for a while, replaced by masks and scrubs, all co-ordinated through the group. Much time was spent deliberating how to get rid of husbands. People went quiet for a few days, but some funny post always brought them back. We all leaned on this group in a way that few people would have imagined. And most of us kept sewing-

Coming next in part two-

Lets have a QAL

Zoom? What's that?