As you may know, Chilliwack has two quilting guilds, a “day guild” and a “night guild”. I am the current president of the the Chilliwack PieceMakers Guild, the “night guild”, and will do some shameless promotion in this post 🙂 We have been very busy trying to adapt to the Covid situation. Our general meetings are every month on the third Wednesday night from 7 to 9 pm. We know that many quilters don’t like driving in the dark, especially in bad weather which is often given as a reason why they don’t want to join a guild that meets at night. This year, all our meetings will take place on Zoom, no driving involved. This is your chance to meet our creative group and join the fun. Zoom is super easy to use, you don’t need to sign up for an account, you just have to follow the invitation link. We ran two test meetings this past week for members to try out Zoom and had a lot of fun. Those who had never used Zoom before were surprised how easy it was. We are offering phone support and step by step walkthroughs, so far we have been able to get everyone connected, no matter how experienced or tech savvy they were.

If you are a local quilter (and local does not just mean Chilliwack, we have members from Abbotsford and Agassiz as well and would certainly welcome quilters from Hope etc… you get the idea) and would like to give our virtual guild life a try, please contact us through our website or leave me a message, and I’ll get you connected. Our September meeting next week will start slow, we want to make sure that everybody can find their way around Zoom, and we will mostly do Show & Tell, so everybody can talk about what they made during the summer. We will also have “Breakout Rooms”, a super fun feature of Zoom. If you have more than a handful of people in a virtual meeting, you can’t really get a real life conversation going, everybody will talk over each other, and you won’t be able to hear a thing. Zoom offers the possibility to divide participants up into a number of smaller rooms, and we will use this feature for our coffee break and randomly place a few people together in rooms to be able to chat and visit and meet new people. We will mix up everything once or twice, so it will be a bit like speed dating and much less intimidating than walking into a real life meeting where everybody seems to know each other.

For October, we have a virtual trunk show and quilting demonstration planned. You will be able to see everything on your screen in detail, much closer than you would be in reality. It will be like looking over the presenter’s shoulder.

We have to stay apart for a while longer but that doesn’t mean we have to be alone. If you would like to join us, please don’t hesitate to contact us, and we will help you get connected.

2 responses to “Calling All Local Quilters: Chilliwack PieceMakers Guild Is Going Virtual”

1. Deloris Berry says:

   September 15, 2020 at 8:19 am

   I live in Montana so not sure I would qualify but would like to join if possible. I already have zoom and have used it. I would just need your starting pass code.

   Reply
   • Beatrice says:

     September 15, 2020 at 9:37 am

     I will contact you via email, Deloris.

     Reply