This year's Road to California was another wonderful exhibition of some of the best quilts in the world! I didn't get to spend much time there since I had the kids with me but what I was able to see left me in awe!I will blog more about it and put up some pictures when I have more time but for right now, I just wanted to highlight one of the best things that happened at R2Cali...we met Ricky Tims!
My son Kevin was really interested in meeting Ricky because he's been curious about quilting for quite a while but he kept avoiding it simply because he was under the false impression that only girls quilted! Oh how wrong he is! A few years ago I introduced Kevin to Ricky's work and found a few other male quilters such as John Flynn and Mark Lipinski. I guess Ricky's quilts just really caught Kevin's attention because he just loves Ricky. So this year I knew that he was going to be at R2Cali so I wanted to take Kevin and let him meeting Mr. Tims. Suffice to say, that's all he talked about the whole way home!
Ricky was so kind and absolutely lovely to my son. He gave Kevin and I some tips on how to get him started such as using the rail fence pattern because Kevy could rip his pieces instead of taking a chance with a rotary cutter. I have been kinda worried about teaching the kids to quilt simply because it can be dangerous. I've had a few injuries quilting and the idea of it happening to my children makes my skin crawl. Once I had my finger go through the machine. Another time I took a rotary cutter across my finger because I was being watched by Sharyn Craig and my nerves got the best of me! HA HA The worst part was, I didn't even realize that I had cut myself until my classmates panicked because of all the blood pooling on my work! But I think Ricky had a great idea and Kevin is already picking his fabrics so he can make a quilt to show to Ricky next year! LOL
On a side note, Ricky told me that he and Alex Anderson are currently working on a curiculum for schools who want to teach quilting as part of their lessons! How cool is that? I'd bet that if more kids got introduced to quilting young, we would have fabric addicts!
