periscope | Night Quilter

Thank you all for being my quilting community. I have so much gratitude in my heart today, after another fun Periscope #honestcraftroomies hop last night, and after receiving the sweetest mini mini from Allison from Campbell Soup Diaries as part of the mini mini quilt swap (Check out #miniminiquiltswap on Instagram to see all the creative fire this little project is sparking), and see Allison’s tutorial for this mini here.

I want to keep this short so that I surely will complete it and post it before baby Finn wakes up from his nap. For those of you with a smart phone, I definitely recommend downloading the Periscope app and watching the scopes that were created last night as part of our weekly #honestcraftroomies Periscope hop. They are viewable for 24 hours, which means you have until 9pm EST tonight to watch them! Here was our schedule last night:

The topic of conversation was “Quilting Community” and our conversation ranged from a real live scope from a booming guild meeting, to reflections on why some of us modern quilters love the local traditional guild like family, all the way to “I make my own guild because I live too far from one—and you’re it”! We spoke about quilting conferences vs retreats, person to person interactions, and online relationships.

As an experiment, and a little peek for those of you who may not have a smart phone, I’ve tried to save my video stream and post it here (embedded from youtube). Please note (and this is important!!), in the actual Periscope stream, little comments appear at the bottom of the screen, so when I suddenly look closely at the camera and seem to reply to someone, I’m actually replying to someone! I’m not crazy, I promise! The video I saved to my phone doesn’t save those comments or the stream of hearts indicating when something I say resonates with viewers especially deeply. So here we go: my real-time, un-edited, late night with a sick baby in the next room, take on quilting community and what it means to me. I hope this works.

(Video disclaimer: In watching this again, I’m pretty sure my nervous fried-brained self said I am a single mom. This couldn’t be further from the truth. I meant full time mom, but I’m a total video beginner and was nervous LOL! I have a loving and supportive husband who is not only a fantastic dad and husband, but also amazingly seems to enjoy talking quilting with me. Please pardon the twisted tongue! I have so much respect for anyone parenting solo, but I’m endlessly grateful to have my husband on my parenting team. I couldn’t do it without him.)

The human connection is so essential to most people, and I’m grateful for the relationships I’ve helped foster over the past couple of years. Allison is one of those with whom I’ve been conversing through blog comments and resulting emails for almost as long as I’ve been blogging, so of course I was game for swapping mini mini quilts with her. We agreed that we were both busy, so the timeline would be relaxed. A day or two later (or less?) she wrote back, “I was inspired. I made your mini.” Little did I know how sweet the two (2) minis would be!

The fabric choices alone make these immediately awesome in my book. Allison clearly knows my favorite designers–Carolyn Friedlander (with some of that much coveted Architextures that I never did get my hands on–swoon!) and Alison Glass.

I especially love the little house, which she calls “The House Where Kitty Lives”. I mean–it’s named after me!! So awesome. Here’s a bit of what she wrote on the card (after Schöne Gruße aus Deutschland!), and why it honestly made me tear up when I opened it:

The second mini is titled “Welcome to the House Where Kitty Lives,” and I designed with you in mind. One window for each child, a heart for the love you share as a family, flowers just starting to bud and a house filled with love and happiness!”

Is that the sweetest thing, or what?! I’m still stitching my love into the mini mini I’m making in return for Allison, and I’m not sure I can come close to a creation as personal and beautiful as this. It will still be a mini mini filled with love, and a little sign of how important my quilting community is–even across the world! Allison lives in Germany. Isn’t the internet an amazing thing!?

Thank you to all of you, enjoy the Periscope hop if you have the capability and time to watch, and happy stitching!

Have you heard of Periscope? It’s an app for smart phones that allows you to live-stream videos straight from wherever you are. The idea is that you can discover the world through someone else’s eyes. This past week, a few quilt-blogger friends and I used it to lead tours of our honest craft spaces, and I got to peek into the homes of some of my quilty friends for the first time (and finally shared a peek at my honest–read: messy–craft loft). In the span of just over an hour, I was able to have a guided tour of seven diverse craft spaces across the country.

This started as just another crazy idea I was tossing around with my friends Stephanie from Late Night Quilter, Terri Ann from Childlike Fascination, and Daisy from Ants to Sugar. We decided to publicly (on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter) post an invitation to join us on an Honest Craft Room Tour in Periscope, and then just jumped in and gave mini, 10 minute tours of our craft spaces, mentioning the next person in the tour at the end of our scopes so that viewers could “hop” to the next video. Early in the tour, Mandy from Mandalei Quilts joined the line-up, and then through the course of the night, Silvia from A Stranger View and Kelley decided to spontaneously join us. It was so much fun to take a peek into the spaces in which these quilter friends create. Our spaces varied from small to large, slanty-roofed loft to basement, messy to neat, yet they all housed so much creativity. It was a night of inspiration and strengthening connections. And it was loads of fun.

While a firm plan is not yet in place, we plan to do these Periscope tours weekly, most likely on Tuesday nights beginning at around 9pm eastern time. Each week will have a focus; maybe one week we will share our top five favorite quilting tools, another week share our latest works in progress, yet another week talk about how we go about choosing fabrics for a project. The sky’s the limit! What kind of videos would you like to see?

Followers of your periscope account get a notification when you are streaming live and can join in, watching and listening, and communicating by typing messages and tapping the screen to create a cloud of rising hearts to show the “scoper” that you like what he/she is saying. If you’re interested in giving it a try, here’s a helpful post with technical tips for getting started with Periscope. Be sure to follow me @nightquilter so that we can communicate in yet another way! Perhaps I’ll see you (literally) through the Periscope!