Chatham Kent Quilter’s Guild celebrates 25th anniversary in style

Special to the Sydenham Current

The Chatham Kent Quilter’s Guild celebrated their 25th Anniversary in style.

An event that has been in the planning since May 2022 finally came to fruition on Friday, September 29th with a sell-out crowd of 300 guests at the Portuguese Club in Chatham.

Liz DiCrescenzo, Chairperson of the guild, welcomed everyone to the event, and told a bit of history, that the guild was started by two special ladies, Joyce Martin-Bruce and Donna Landry.

She then called Joyce & Donna up to the stage.

Joyce told how she & Donna had met working at Sears and started a lifelong friendship.

They had a similar interest in quilting and wondered how many other women had the same interest in joining them in a guild.

Their first meeting was January 21, 1998 at the WISH Centre.

It became apparent at that first night that there were too many quilters for such a small space and they’ve been meeting ever since at St. Paul’s Congregational Church and here we are, 25 years later, celebrating the birth of CKQG.

Joyce then gave a bit of history on Donna’s life and awarded her with an Honourary Lifetime Membership in the guild. Congratulations, Donna.

Mayor Darrin Caniff was on hand to bring greetings on behalf of the Muncipality of Chatham-Kent and presented Liz with an award from the Municipality in recognition of 25 years.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also recognize the other chartered quilters who have belonged to the guild for 25 years—Donna Ward, Phene Richardson, Connie Abel, Sandy Sedge, Diana Vereecken, Helen Spence and Lisa Hill.

After a delicious meal catered by Four Diamond Catering Company, Karen Pynenbrouck thanked the caterers and the 25th Anniversary Committee and gave a brief introduction to our guest speaker, Jenny Doan of the Missouri Star Quilt Company, who is celebrating their 15th birthday this year.

For anyone who wasn’t at the event, or doesn’t know who Jenny is, she’s the most famous quilter in the world.

She’s a YouTube sensation with almost 900,000 subscribers and over 210 million views.

If you are interested in learning more about her, grab a copy of her book “How to Stitch an Amercian Dream.”

Jenny and her daughter, Natalie, showed many different ways of designing quilts, just by cutting blocks and changing their direction, or mixing and matching blocks to create new looks.

After each example, would show us a quilt that was made using the new block.

She brought 30 or more quilts with her in her trunk show and educated us with how easy it was to think outside of the patterns that we use.

We were fortunate to have some young ladies from one of our local schools walk the quilts around so everyone could see them.

Following the show of quilts, Jenny entertained us with stories.

Stories about letters she receives from all over the world, how she has changed the lives of so many people, and even saved some lives.

A U.S. Marine was suffering from PTSD and took up quilting to relief the stress.

She also commented that a lot of nurses tell her that quilting helps relieve their stress and she asked that everyone in the health care field stand and she recognized them by a round of applause for their efforts throughout the pandemic.

As well, she recognized quilters as a whole, who go above and beyond “quilting” to help out whenever needed.

The ones who made masks, nurses caps, and scrubs when there weren’t any available.

Tornado & hurricane relief, when so many families are displaced, quilters come to their aid by way of quilts so that they are wrapped in warmth, wherever they happen to be laying their heads that night.

And Comfort Quilts (a round of applause to our own Comfort Quilt group), who provide chemo and radiation patients, dialysis patients and those in need otherwise so that they know there are others out there who care and want them to get better.

She talked about one quilt that she was commissioned to longarm quilt.

Every time she stepped near it, she’d start crying (and she’s not a crier).

Finally she asked her client what the significance of the quilt was, to which she replied, it was for a friend going through her cancer journey.

Jenny said this just proves that our emotions are sewn into every quilt we make.

Perhaps that’s why our children and grandchildren hold onto our quilts so tightly and keep them forever, they feel that love even after we are gone

Finally, Jenny talked about the Sisterhood of Quilting.

She said that we are a unique group of women from every walk of life, who band together to help each other and the community when needed. We should be proud of who we are and what we do.

She had us laughing and crying and to say this was a spectacular night, with a wonderful lady, is an understatement.

Day 2: The Workshop

On Saturday, September 30, 60 quilters came together to participate in the Jenny Doan workshop held at St. Paul’s Congregational Church.

We all worked on the same quilt, Opposites Attract”, but by using so many different fabrics, all had a unique flare to them.

Jenny showed us how to easily sew half square triangles by sewing all the way around the square of fabric, then cutting diagonally, turning the square and cutting the other diagonal, to get four half square triangles.

She then showed us other ways of cutting these triangles using the Slotted Trimmers and other rulers to get the best results.

There are so many ways to do the job, but she suggests that you use the tools that you are most comfortable using.

As we were working away on our project, Jenny would talk about different techniques she uses when quilting and emphasized that she is not a perfect quilter, that she’s a utilitarian quilter.

She quilts to get the job done, not to win ribbons in a show.

As a matter of fact, she told us that she’s never entered a quilt in a show, nor ever had one of hers judged.

That’s not important to her.

This just goes to show you that everyone quilts for their own reasons.

The workshop went from 9 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. when we broke for lunch and they headed back to Hamilton, Missouri (aka Disneyland for Quilters).

It’s been a weekend of learning and laughing with our favourite quilter, Jenny Doan, her daughter, Natalie Earnheart, and Jenny’s ever-so-helpful assistant, Cherry Hill.

I speak for myself and so many others when I say that we will be forever grateful that she accepted our invitation to our 25th Anniversary Celebration.

For so many of us, we can now stroke that off our bucket list.

The CKQG meets once a month at St. Paul’s Congregational Church on Park Ave. W. in Chatham from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

If you are interesting in joining us, please contact ckquiltguild@gmail.com or check out our Facebook or Website pages for more details.

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