Tuesday, January 29, 2013

My Bonnie moment

I have often wondered what it would be like to be Bonnie Hunter, zig zagging across the USA, teaching her wonderful classes. She often describes her huge duffel bags, packed with quilts. Quilts can get quite heavy! I have recently had the chance to haul my own heavy bags of quilts around.

A couple of weeks ago, I subbed for a second grade teacher on a Monday. They were just starting a new reading passage that week and it was titled "A Quilt Story". The story was about a little girl who felt more at home in a new place because she had her beloved quilt with her. Anyway...several kids in the class had no idea what the difference between a blanket and a quilt is.

I talked to the teacher and told her I would be glad to bring in a few quilts and do a little presentation for the kids. She was so excited!

When I came in, I started off by asking them if they knew what scraps were - and got a great explanation! I went on to show them scraps, some batting, and some orphan blocks. I had them guess the name of a few blocks - a log cabin block, flying geese, and a spiderweb block. I explained how I would take blocks and piece them into a quilt top.

At this point I showed them my scrappy trips top and asked them to guess how many little squares were in this top. They were all very surprised when I finally gave them the correct answer of 900!

I showed them several different quilts and got lots of oohs and aahs. They asked great questions like how long it takes to make a quilt. I showed them a picture of my featherweight and of my long arm machine. They thought it was funny that my sewing machine is almost twenty years older than me - and they think I am old.  

I did three presentations last week and did my last one this morning.  It has been a lot of fun sharing my quilts with these kids. One little girl has repeatedly come up to me and asked me to please teach her to sew!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

When my youngest was about 6 I was approached by her class teacher who had just started to learn patchwork and quilting and she needed some help and tips from someone slightly more experienced - as is so often the case with the common ground of quilting we have become firm friends and because the children were studying pattern she encouraged me to bring a selection of quilts in to show the kids and I had a wonderful morning sharing them, reading a quilt based story and handing out colouring sheets with quilty pictures for them to colour in - as a result of this we worked on a joint project helping the children make a quilt to donate to Project Linus. The children were given a pale blue fabric square to either write their name or draw a picture of themselves in fabric pens. Then the chidren joined these blue squares with scrappy squares to make 4patches. I then alternated them with a fun dark blue fabric with beachballs on, added a border, quilted it up and finished the quilt. None of the children were older than 7 but I was quite surprised at how competent some of them were and it was such a fun project to be part of - I so wish I had taken a photo at the time