I’ve written about my quilting sister, Tess, many times. She is our guild’s Challenge Queen, Ribbon Queen, and Creative Genius of Quilting. She has motivated all of us to be better at what we are doing, to try new things, and to enjoy the act of quiltmaking.
After coming up with twenty-five glorious ideas for our guild’s challenges, she has decided to retire from that role. Her shoes are unfillable – not that her feet are big – but her store of ideas and her sense of humor that has led to such interesting titles for our challenges will be a hard act to follow.
Not only have her titles and descriptions been interesting, the ribbons she makes for the winners are always perfect. Take for example, the ones above for our most recent Something Feathered challenge. And here are a couple of others:
At the conclusion of most recent meeting, our president presented Queen Tess with a quilt made by guild members to show her our appreciation for all her hard work. The quilt has 25 blocks, one representing each of the challenges led by Tess. As she viewed the quilt, Tess could immediately recognize some of the challenges and she was heard to exclaim, “oh, that’s the Brown Bag challenge”, and “I remember baskets, and log cabins, and oh, there’s the fans!”
The label on the back memorializes her status as Queen Tess. I didn’t get a photo, but the label is in the shape of a crown.
I’m not sure what that next act will be…our guild is yet to decide. Will we continue the annual challenge? Will we have one leader? Will we rotate the leadership about the guild? Will a committee determine the challenge each year? Will the winner of one year decide on the challenge for the next?
In the absence of a volunteer in the immediate future (at a time when the guild wasn’t meeting because of Covid), I agreed to plan the challenge for 2021. That doesn’t mean I’m locked into it forever…all the aforementioned possibilities need to be considered. But doing it once shows me how challenging it is to think of everything to plan a challenge…to get the details right, to communicate it to all, and to inspire people to participate. Really, it’s more fun to participate in making a quilt following Tess’s guidelines. But, I do understand that she’s ready to sit back and watch…and make the quilt that takes home the blue ribbon – without having had to make the ribbons.