Friday, May 3, 2013

Mentoring in reverse

Mentoring...the time old tradition of older people teaching what they know and passing on their knowledge and wisdom to the younger folks.

Lately those roles have been reversed. These last 8 months I've been in the position to being the mentor to a person older than myself...my sister Tina. Since she called me last fall, after she saw a jelly roll quilt on Pinterest and wanted to try making one herself, we've spent a LOT of time on the phone talking about quilting as it is these days...with some of the modern methods, terms and what is found in the online quilting world.

Since she hadn't done any of her hand quilting in 15 years, she had never heard of Charm Packs, Jelly Rolls or Fat Quarters before. When I talked about "wonky" she replied "huh"? I mentioned "fussy cutting" one day and she said "what's that". Needless to say that there has been a lot of laughing between us as I help to bring her into the modern day quilting world. You can imagine just how tough it was to "teach" her how to sew binding strips together, attach them to her quilt and to join the two ends to have it fit around her quilt all by phone.

Another part of the quilting community that I have taught her about is all the wonderful blogs...where we see gorgeous projects, learn from terrific tutorials, find new tools and gadgets that we just must have and where we enter giveaways, hoping to win every once in a while. She was even luckily enough to win her first giveaway recently, a jelly roll from 1 Choice 4 Quilting.

A couple of weeks back she decided she wanted a quilting blog of her own. This is the newest "lessons" that she has been taking from me. I've been blogging since 2006 but she has never done anything like this. Here is the funny part of this tale.....she runs and is the president of a computer teaching school but she didn't know a single thing about blogging. She just launched it the other day and I have to say that I'm really proud of all that she has accomplished so far. She named it Sew Sassy Quilts.
Trust me...once she gets the hang of this blogging thing, she'll be off and running. And I know that we'll be posting jointly about our quilting escapades together. Watch out! When us sisters get together, one never knows what craziness will happen. So if you want to show my big sis some love, hop on over to her new place and say "Hi!" I'm sure she'd love "meeting' you.

3 of you added your own colorful comments:

Diane-crewe said...

will pop over now and say hello x

Sarah said...

I've begun following her blog too!

Tina said...

PS: Mentoring has nothing to do with who is older, LOL.
Thanks Michele, this has been a blast and I look forward to many more joint ventures.