Hello all, Mary Ellen here.

We had our monthly guild meeting last evening. Committee chairs spoke about their groups, activities and how one can get involved if so desired. It is amazing to me how much we have going on in our guild. We can rightfully be proud of all of the charity work that gets made and given away with little, if any, fanfare. True giving from the heart (and hands).

Lori R and I demonstrated our guild’s Accuquilt machine. It is available for any of our members to use whenever the BNHV is open. You can find documents of what dies we own at our guild’s web page. Some of our members were not aware we owned the machine, and some of our long time members had not seen how easy it is to operate. In today’s e-mail I got a link to a video where a shop owner is demonstrating, with a representative from Accucut, the machines that are available to consumers. Our machine will do the same things-on a somewhat larger scale. Our machine is the studio model which is designed for shop owners and other quilting professionals who would give the machine heavier use than a home owned machine would get. Still you might like to see what they have to say. Click here. I think the her mention that all of the binding strips for a king size quilt can be cut with one pass through the machine is quite impressive. (Our machine can do it too!)

Lori and I have plans for an Accuquilt demo session and a project class in the works. We will announce the dates and times via our e-mail tree and our guild newsletter.

Since I also wear the hat of a seminar co-chair I want to make sure that those who were not able to attend last evening’s meeting know that we have plans in the works for re-vamping our fall seminar. I spoke a bit about the concerns Jan R. (my co-chair), the guild board and I have discussed about the escalating costs of seminar, and the  declining interest from our members. We want to make seminar an activity that serves the needs of our own members first of all. The mission of seminar has always been continuing education of our members. That fits perfectly with the mission of the BNHV as well. There have been rumors circulating that there would be no more seminars. That is not true. We have made the decision to cancel the national teacher we had contracted for 2016. That is the only firm cancellation of anything related to seminar. Seminars going forward may or may not look like those in the past. We are asking those members who would like to get involved in the process of redesigning seminar to come to a meeting at 6:00 prior to the August guild meeting. I’m sure that this meeting will just be the first of several (many?) as we put together a new style seminar. We are hoping to get input from the long time attendees of seminar and from new members as well. Please join us if you would like to be part of our seminar “design” team.