Postal surprise

When you order several books online, it's a bit of a surprise when any one of them arrives - which will it be...?

When the postie rang the bell and needed me to sign for what was obviously a book, I couldn't for the life of me remember what I'd ordered recently. With the amount of forgetting I managed in the past week, this memory-failure didn't exactly come as a surprise.

But inside the package was this -

an advance copy of a book I'd had a small part in producing - the real work (photographs, design, layout) was done, in time freely given, by Hilary, Janet, and Jane.

The book, which will be available at Festival of Quilts next week, is the catalogue for the CQ@10 exhibition, and also gives an extensive photographic record of the challenges, exhibitions, and journal quilt projects in the group's first decade. Fully 139 of the book's pages are absolutely full of high-quality photos.

A heartfelt plea

If anyone from CQ is reading this and has ever considered volunteering to help with CQ projects, I urge you to do so. Most urgently, CQ needs people for several vacant committee posts - the term is three years, otherwise I'd have been happy to continue for longer. It's definitely good to have a change of personnel, though! We started "not knowing how" -- but this book is an example of what can be done when people decide to do something and Just.Get.On.With.It.

"Pulling people out of the ranks" to do the necessary jobs is always a problem for any membership organisation. Some members are too modest about their abilities, or imagine it will take over their free time. (These are unfounded worries, imho.) What these shy members forget, or perhaps have not yet experienced, is how much fun it can be to be involved, and to contribute - we're all in it together, but we do need folk to step forward!