How I became a quilter - Part II

The AAQ message board was unlike any message board I had ever seen. The technical boards I had been to were . . . slow. Someone would post a question and maybe in a month or two they would get a reply. Most questions went unanswered. I guess they were frequented more by people with problems than by people with solutions.

Alex's board, on the other hand, was busy. The first page contained posts from that day, maybe the day before, but no older than that. The posts weren't all questions and they weren't all about quilting either. And they all had replies, most of them had multiple replies. They were conversations, conversations about quilting, conversations about children & family, conversations about pets, conversations about vacations, conversations about life.

I began reading these conversations every day and I quickly got to know these people. After a couple of weeks I realized that they didn't even know I existed. So I gathered up the courage to join in the conversation and introduced myself. It was great to have a group of new friends with quilting in common and over time we discovered we had more things in common.

One day there was a post announcing that there was an opening for the first ever Alex Anderson Quilt Retreat being held in Livermore, CA. Livermore is only an hour and a half away, I could drive. I quickly emailed Suji and I was in! I was going to meet some of my new found friends in real life!

It was August 2001. Little did I know that soon, all our lives would be changed in an instant. . . .