Quilting Royalty

A couple of years ago we got into selling Innova Quilting Systems  a.k.a long arm machines.  I convinced the bank to lend us an inordinate amount of money so we could buy some "inventory" and stock or "show room"( the show room would not exist for another six months).  A trailer truck pulls up 3 weeks later and drops four pallets in our parking lot.  I spend the next week looking at diagrams and playing with wrenches because I am to impatient for the factory tech to get here and teach me everything I need to know.  I had one of the machine put together but I waited for Keith to show up before I flipped the switch, I figured if he was on site I could blame him if it melted down and I fried ten thousand dollars worth of equipment.  We have since bought insurance for that.

Keith showed up and helped me get the rest of my armada built and a couple days later Innova sends out a pair of gals to train us on how to use the new pile of awesomeness that displaced our classroom and my beloved Statler.  

One of the gals, Renae, starts training my on the Auto Pilot which  is  the big computerized work horse that I do 97.836%  of all my quilting on.  While we are waiting for it to stitch out a pattern I start talking to her.

"You do a lot of quilting?" A dumb question, but it was a conversation starter.

"Oh yes, at my shop we run two Auto Pilots pretty much non stop."  was her kind response.

"You ever run anything other than an Innova?"

"I used a Gammil for a while then I switched to  an A1 before settling on an Innova."

At this point I am thinking to myself that Renae is a serious quilter.  How serious I was about to find out.

"Why did you switch?"

"Let me show you..."  

Renae then proceeds to pull a huge book looking thing out of her bag, it wasn't really a book it was "draft" copy of an upcoming book.  Now I am thinking she must be important because she gets to edit quilt books.  

She opens up the manuscript and points to a picture.

"This was done with a Gamill."

She flips a few pages.

"This was done with an A-1"

Flips back a page.

"Here is where I started using the Innova"

As I was looking at the pictures I could see exactly what she was talking about, the difference in stitch quality was noticeably once it was pointed out.

"You wrote a quilt book, do you do show quilts?"  I should be the next Anderson Cooper with my deep probing questions.

"Karen Buckley and I won best in show in Paducah last year." I recognized Karen's name because we sell her scissors in the store, and I recognized Paducah because that is like "The quilt show of quilt shows".

"So you are like quilting royalty?" I did ask a question that stupid.

"Something like that."

That's what happened when the competition proven Master Quilter Renae Haddadin spent a day in our shop.  I had know idea who she was.  I have to say she is super nice and down to earth and not the least bit pretentious.