Meeting Fellow Quillers in the Stranger Sitting Next To You

What are the odds of two strangers sitting next to each other on a bus and finding out that they are both quillers? Well I am no mathematician, but considering how few quillers there are in the world, I would assume the odds of that happening were very small. It happened in July. I had to spend some time with my mother and her husband who was recovering from multiple strokes. They live in The Villages, FL, which is an awesome retirement community (if you like Florida, which I do not, especially in July . . . UGH) When it was time for me to head back to Connecticut, I took a shuttle bus from the Villages to the Orlando airport. I was sitting on the bus reading, waiting to leave when a woman came over and asked if she could sit next to me. We got to chatting and I told her that I was going back home and needed to get back to work. She asked me what I did . . . (don’t you just hate that question, cause then you have to explain what quilling is to someone who never heard of it. Oh I just roll little bits of paper up and then pinch them into etc., etc., etc.-you know, you’ve all been there) Well, imagine how shocked I was when I told her I was a quiller and she responded that she was too! We spent a delightful hour and a half on the shuttle talking about quilling, how she got started quilling and how I got started. We talked about selling our work, and making quilled cards, who her teacher was, finding other quillers, the North American Quilling Guild and so on. You know the kinds of conversations quillers always have when they find each other. We exchanged email addresses and when I handed her my business card, she got so excited because she was visiting with Whimsiquills! So then the conversation shifted to my web site, and the blog and the different things I’ve done since starting Whimsiquills. When we got to the airport, we continued to “hang out” while we waited for our flights. She was heading to Long island, NY, so I let her know that the 2010 NAQGCON was going to be held there; she had missed the Tampa NAQGCON due to illness. One of the many things we talked about was a quilled doll she had made. I asked her to send me a picture because it sounded like a novel idea and I would like to post a picture on my blog. She said she used needlework canvas for the dress and placed the quilling on that. We’ve stayed in touch through emails and Facebook, and every time we “speak” we laugh about how we found each other. I guess it was just serendipity.

BTW I do have a page on Facebook and I have started a quillers group as well.