I taught a hand quilting class at my quilt guild’s day camp yesterday.

Not only had I never taught a class at day camp before, I’d never taught a class anywhere, or even attended a class at day camp as a student. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m pretty sure the day camp chairperson tricked me into teaching the class. Hypnosis may have been involved.

When the sign-up sheet for classes was made available to students, I thought maybe nobody would sign up for my class. No such luck. Ten foolish guild members thought I could teach them how to hand quilt.

For the weeks leading up to the class, I kept muttering “What was I thinking?” under my breath every time I was reminded that the class date was approaching. In the hours leading up to the class start time, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to show up.

But that morning, I packed up my usual hand quilting supplies, then swept pretty much the entire contents of my sewing cabinet into the bag, on the theory that I might need something, and I wouldn’t want to find that I’d left that something at home.

It was a sunny day, and there was a chance that nobody would show up to the class. No such luck. While a few did cancel, I still had eight eager students. There was a chance I was going to pass out from the anxiety before the class even started.

I stalled as long as I could, but they clearly expected me to teach. So, at four minutes past the hour, I dove in.

Figuring we were hardly going to finish an entire project in one 3-hour class, I’d suggested they just bring two fat quarters of fabric (18″ x 22″) – one for the front and one for the back of their little practice piece, with batting sandwiched in between. I put them to work basting their quilt sandwiches together, figuring they’d be looking at their basting stitches instead of looking at me while I talked about what kind of fabric and batting were best for hand quilting.

When that was done, I passed out stencils and marking pencils (from my extensive collection), and set them to work marking some quilting designs on their quilt sandwiches. Another brilliant ploy to keep anyone from looking at me while I talked about how hearts were a good shape for learning hand quilting, since they incorporate straight lines, curved lines, and points/corners.

We worked our way through the tasks of putting the quilt sandwich into the hoop and coating the thread with beeswax. I forgot to tell any “none of your beeswax” jokes, but I don’t think they were missed.

When I’d recklessly agreed to teach the class, the day camp chairperson told me the last time she taught hand quilting, she ended up spending most of the class time trying to teach her students how to tie the knot at the end of the thread. So, I approached this portion of the class with some trepidation.

I showed my students the method I learned for knot tying, which is closely akin to magic. I don’t understand why it works, but it does, and you end up with a knot that is just small enough to wiggle through the layers to be embedded in the batting, but just large enough that it doesn’t wiggle right back out again.

A few people struggled with the knot, but we definitely didn’t need to spend the entire class on it. I felt like I was starting to hit my stride.

At this point, we were over an hour into the class, though, and we had yet to take a single stitch. The natives were getting restless. This was what they had come for: to learn how to do the elusive rocking stitch and produce beautiful hand quilting.

Everyone gathered around me while I did my best to demonstrate the rocking stitch in slow motion. Turns out it’s really hard to do it slowly – at one point my needle escaped the fabric and pinwheeled through the air. Luckily nobody was hurt.

There were many demands to know the “right” number of stitches per inch that they should be producing. They didn’t seem satisfied with the stock answer that the number of stitches didn’t matter so much as that the stitches were of uniform length. A few people started measuring their stitches and comparing numbers, but no fights broke out.

The rest of the class was a blur of people asking me to demonstrate tying knots, demonstrate starting a new thread, demonstrate the rocking stitch, and demonstrate tying off the thread at the end – not always in that order, but always in rapid succession. You can see in the photo above that with all the stopping and starting, my stitches were not all especially uniform.

It was very hot in the room, and I was feeling pretty dizzy from over two hours of people looking at me. I was relieved when the class started winding down and the students began packing up to go home.

In my mind, it was pretty clear that I’m not cut out to be a professor, but the students seemed like they had a good time, and were wondering aloud about whether I was going to teach more day camp classes in the future. The jury’s still out on that, but I’m still glad I tackled this challenge. It’s good to try new things, and I’m pleased that I might have been able to get at least one more person interested in quilting by hand.