The Modern Quilt Guild’s Board of Directors includes five elected Regional Representatives. Jules McMahon is Founder and President of Canberra Modern Quilt Guild, and she was also voted Regional Representative on the Modern Quilt Guild Board. We caught up with Jules at the Australasian Quilt Convention, where MQGs from around Australia were exhibiting.
Can you tell us a bit about your quilting story?
I’ve grown up sewing, my mother was a dressmaker and I remember making my first garment at about 8. I came to be a quilter when my best friend from high school was having her first baby and that was about 15 years ago now. Looking back on it now, it’s really reflective of where I was going to head. I didn’t take any lessons and I just sort of decided I’d make something up and I went to a fabric store and bought a whole lot of fabric. I had no idea where it was going, except it would have an ocean theme. I made a centre medallion piece with a seal on it, and it evolved from there, so I think I’ve always been an improvisational quilter! It was appliqued, because I wasn’t even entirely sure how to piece anything and it was hand quilted.
How did you go from that first experience into a more modern style?
After that first quilt, I then met my now husband, and my mother-in-law, who was a very traditional quilter. She had learned how to quilt, and she could do 13 stitches to the inch, and her work was absolutely immaculate. She didn’t believe in using sewing machines for quilting at all, and so she taught me how to piece by hand, but I used to get in a lot of trouble from her, because she was so precise and so talented – my points didn’t meet properly and I felt too uptight with it, I couldn’t quite get myself into it.
A few years after that I was at home with my children and I started reading blogs – blogs became the thing when I had first left the workforce, and for me that I was how I got into it, seeing these quilts online and thinking: “I can do that!”. So I found Gwen Marsden and Denyse Schmidt and others. And I also found fabrics by Australian fabric designer Jan Mullins – they were really bright! That had been one of the drawbacks for me in the beginning, the country colours, the muted browns. So I found Jan Mullins’ fabrics, which now are even a little too bright and funky, but I still love them because they mean a lot to me. But Gwen Marsden and Denyse Schmidt were huge influences on my work.
What led you to get involved with MQG to the point that you wanted to run for office?
When MQG (Modern Quilt Guild) started I was contacting them asking if we could set up branches internationally, from the very beginning I wanted to do that, and my girlfriend Kathreen Ricketson (who has since passed away) and I were talking about setting up a Guild in Canberra, and that got a little bit of momentum and we started our own Canberra Guild. The reason for that is that we’d actually met people like Danielle Auckens and Georgie Kelly online, and I wanted to have those connections in person because having the online community is really beautiful, but there’s nothing quite like sitting in a room having a discussion with someone over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. So Dan and George help me set up the Guild and we just wanted to pull together people. In the beginning to be honest we were just setting it up for ourselves and just wanting to be part of a bigger organisation and we kind of didn’t care if nobody came, we just had this “build it and they will come” dream. But what ended up happening though was that all these Canberra people who we knew through Twitter and Instagram and Facebook groups, and Flickr even before Facebook took off, joined us, and before we knew it we had 35 people who were sitting around the table!
Having the Canberra Guild set up, what I actually wanted to do was interact with Australian Modern Quilt Guilds a little more and have a bit more support locally about what we were doing. But I’m also the kind of person who just volunteers for things! I was working with the MQG doing a lot of other volunteer work, and I went to QuiltCon in 2013, and I served on the admin committee of MQG, and helped prepare the first Annual Report. My involvement was quite organic, so when the Board nominations came up I just jumped in and thought I’d do it and give it a go and sort of thought that nothing would actually come of it! And now, here I am!
Can you tell us a bit more about your role on the Board?
The MQG Board is made up of elected representatives from 5 different regions of the world. The USA is split into 4 regions, and region 5 is the rest of the world! So I’m representing all the MQG members around the world outside of the USA. The international rep in terms of its position is unique. Mainland USA have a lot of events – they have a couple of quilt markets a year, there’s Sewtopia, Camp Stitch-a-lot, there’s event after event after event. For people in the UK or Europe or Asia or Australia, even Canada, to attend these event, it’s international travel for them. One of my aims is to move some events around a little, so that members internationally can have a little more exposure to those amazing opportunities.
My term is for 3 years, so I’ll be at the next 2 QuiltCons, including next year’s event where the keynote speaker is Gwen Marston, who was so influential in my modern quilting journey!
How can we get in touch with you?
If people want to get more involved with MQG, they can contact me at jules@themodernquiltguild.com