Greetings, and Happy New Year to all of you! The new year brings some new faces on the Board—or, in some cases, some existing (I don’t want to say “old”) faces in some new roles. In keeping with this year’s Round Robin challenge, three of us simply passed our previous Board positions to each other: I passed the job of Newsletter Editor to Carol Simpson, Carol passed Treasurer to Terry Simon, and Terry passed President to me! She assured me that being President didn’t involve much—I just had to sit back and let everyone else around me do the work. So far I think the hardest part is going to be writing the monthly President’s column for the newsletter—Terry’s were always hilarious, and she’s going to be a hard act to follow.
For those of you who don’t know me yet, a brief introduction: I am really a Mainer, but came out to California six years ago because I thought that going back to school at fifty would be a good idea. (The jury’s still out on that. Ask me again after I graduate.) Back in the spring of 2014 I had finished a big class presentation and decided I needed to do something “quilty” to de-stress; I found an announcement online about the WFQG yard sale, came to pet the fabric and commune with my kind, and never left. I’m working on a degree in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at Claremont School of Theology, and hope to be a teacher when I grow up. Actually, I’ve heard it said that if you haven’t grown up by the time you turn 50, you don’t have to, which is a relief—but at some point I do need to finish qualifying exams and a dissertation, and find a job. After all, I have a fabric habit to support. My quilting friends back in Maine refuse to believe that I chose the school based on the faculty here; they’re all convinced it was because of the proximity to the Road to California show. (I swear that was just a very happy coincidence.)
Speaking of Road to California, how many of you are planning to go? Do you want to help WFQG maybe win a prize while you’re there? This year, Road is hosting a “Guild Attendance Challenge,” and giving away two $500 prizes, one to the guild with the highest total number of members attending the show, and the other to the guild with the highest percentage of their membership attending. We probably can’t compete in the total-number category, as there are guilds out there that are bigger than ours, but I think—based on the number of us who have attended in previous years—we stand a good chance in the highest percentage category! So please, when you go to Road this year, check in at the information desk, and sign in as a member of WFQG. (For those of you who are members of multiple guilds, it apparently will be possible for you to sign in to them all, so you don’t have to choose which of your groups to support.) Remember, your sign-in might be the one that puts us over the top and wins the prize!
See you at the meeting,
Pam