After I posted my blog for today, I was cruising through my favorite blogs and ran across something that disturbed me so much that I felt that I needed to address this.
One of my favorite blogs is That Crazy Quilty Girl's blog. For those who aren't in the know about this young lady, let me edumacate ya...she is brilliant....she is extremely talented.....and she is someone who shares her work with the rest of us graciously. She is also someone who recently had some gnarley comments made about her work that I feel was totally unwarranted. I didn't read the discussion myself however, I read enough of the backlash to piece together generally what happened. Her name is Lisa and she is young. In fact, her and I are pretty close in age and I think that's why her being chastized for her work really bothered me.
I don't care how young a quilter is. When I started out quilting, I was a kid and when I became serious about my quilting I was around 20 years old. I remember going into a quilt shop once and the owner following me around. When I asked her why she was following me, she told me that I didn't "belong" in a quilt shop. She thought I was intending to shoplift from her store! Little did she know that not only was I not intending to shoplift, I made a huge amount of money for someone my age and it wasn't unheard of for me to spend several hundred dollars in one quilt shop trip. In fact, my favorite quilt shop, Donna's Quilt Shop, which is now gone, was very used to be dropping in there and walking out hundreds of dollars lighter! HA HA If I were to take a guess, I would have to imagine that I spent about $10,000 at Donna's over the years. Not only was I young, I had money and frankly, not enough common sense to not do something like that! The end result was that I have never stepped foot in that quilt shop again. When's Donna's shop closed, I resorted to going down to Palm Springs to buy my quilting supplies. Local money that because of someone's age prejudice, went out of our community.
Lisa's talent is in longarm quilting. Her work is breath taking. My first thought when I saw her work wasn't, "Oh she's so young." It was, wow, only 3 years in and she's already able to do this? Some of us learn our craft...some are born to do it. Beyond that, the detail in her work clearly shows that she is not doing it with an automated system. She is designing and executing her quilting on the quilts she does.
So short point made long, don't hate. Don't discriminate. Don't judge others work. Appreciate the beauty and artistic nature of everyone's work and remember, we are all each others cheerleaders! I may not consider your work to be something I would do but I would never feel that your contribution is anything less than wonderful.
By the way, go check out Lisa's blog...seriously....
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