Zooming along

Everyone is doing it - avoiding travel, avoiding getting too close, or just getting together more often - zooming has acquired a new meaning in such a short time. Other brands are available - but none so far, in my experience, match up to a Zoom meeting for a live socially (and geographically) distanced get-together.

Zoom has brought us closer together as a family - meeting up and chatting with our adult children far more frequently than we did in pre-lockdown days. The vehicle for our meeting is playing games together online - Dominion, which in normal times we would play in real life when we got together in the holidays, and also Lexulous, an online version of Scrabble.

Dominion online works pretty well as a substitute for the real thing, speeding up some of the slow processes - and allowing for expansion packs we don’t possess. Lexulous has its weaknesses - a poor distribution of letters (only 3 of each of S U !!), and a surprising dictionary which causes many cries of ‘is that word??’ - it turns out the game dictionary thinks so, though our usual arbiters, the Chambers and Collins Dictionaries, don’t think so; however we put up with it as we enjoy the time together.

Zoom has also provided opportunities to meet up with social groups which can’t operate in real life - our walking group met once a fortnight for Covid Coffee, during the tightest of the lockdown and a subset of my WI meet monthly, though we haven’t had a speaker, we have chatted about books read, and also some local news. It is a shame that the demographic of our WI means that quite a few members don’t have access to the technology to join us. The wider WI organisation regionally and nationally has organised a range of talks for members.

The lockdown has certainly made many organisations rethink their offerings to members and the wider public. There are lots of talks and lectures available but also more interactive courses and workshops too. There have been a number of highlights for me.

We were asked to cut out without any planned sketches, whilst listening to a piece of improvised Jazz music.

HENRI MATISSE ONLINE: Painting with Scissors with Francis Stanfield of the London Drawing Group . Francis led us gently along to create paper collage, using the work of Matisse as inspiration. I hadn’t done anything like this before, and although I haven’t done any more since, I will come back to this, perhaps as an inspiration for my next quilt; I have been enjoying the Instagram posts of Sarah Hibbert, who posts her amazing quilts @quiltscornerstone and her collages @cornerstonecollages . This class included people from all parts of the world - something that would be impossible with a face to face class; the large number of participants meant that there was not the opportunity for discussion, though the Chat facility provided some space for that.

I had a very different, but excellent, Zoom experience for Janet Clare’s Little Cottages workshop. She was in her studio and it almost felt like we were there too - there were not many of us and we were able to chat with her as she sewed and ask for help during the evening. The first half of the workshop was a great introduction to free motion machine stitching, we began with our name, some faces, chickens, and sheep.

After a break we stitched our cottages. I has delighted with the result and use the same approach later to make a fabric postcard for a swap in our guild.

The Festival of Quits is a highlight of many quilters’ year, unfortunately that fell victim to the need for social distancing and was replaced by Beyond the Festival of Quilts - providing online access to a collection of workshops, some paid for and some free. Various regions of the Quilters Guild have also been moving online - here in Yorkshire (Region 14) we held our first online event - a Virtual Sewing Bee in July - resulting in lots of people seeing and chatting to friends across the region for the first time in months - and the production of 164 Friendship square blocks to make quilts for Siblings Together. We have since met up for coffee and chat along with a show and tell of quilts made over lockdown.

I started this post some time ago and never quite got round to completing it, as at the time we seemed to be opening up - I even went to a face to face workshop. But now it is all getting tight again and hoped for events are being cancelled once more. The Knitting and Stitching Show, an Autumn favourite has had to cancel - and everywhere we are being more careful - when will we meet again??