A Personal Note: Stepping Down as a Professional Quilt Teacher

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Quilters,

Today, I am announcing a very big change in my quilting career. I have made a decision to exit the professional quilt teaching circuit. This means that I will no longer be teaching or lecturing at the National Quilt shows or for local guilds/retreats. While this news may come as a surprise to many, I have been personally wrestling with this decision for a good portion of this year and now I am finally at peace with my decision.

The main reason for this decision was primarily due to the impact of Covid 19. The pandemic has altered things for so many people and in some unimaginable ways. Professionally speaking, it has only taken away my teaching opportunities in 2020 and 2021. But “only taken away” is more of an understatement. It has been a very quiet, lonely year and no one has the crystal ball to forecast what lies ahead. I am not sharing this information for sympathy. I understand the seriousness of this pandemic and I feel for everyone who has been impacted by Covid. But for me, as a quilt teacher, I need those in person connections in order to feel happy, to thrive and to gain personal reward. I miss giving lectures to guilds or moving around a classroom filled with quilters, sharing, teaching and connecting with them. I also truly miss spending time with other like-minded colleagues, industry professionals and getting together with quilt friends.

As some of you read this, you might be thinking, then why wouldn’t she move to the online teaching platform like the majority of professional quilt teachers are doing. To answer this truthfully, I thought I would have wanted to move in this direction too. I invested both time and money into tech equipment, researched what other professionals in our industry were doing and I enrolled in a few courses to learn how to properly online teach. But it wasn’t until I actually started practicing some of my new methods of online teaching that I figured out that online teaching wasn’t going to be the best fit for me.

I would also be remiss not mention or thank the many supporters, friends, and industry professionals who helped guide me with their wisdom and experience. I would not have made it this far without their help. For those of you that don’t know, people in the quilt industry are pretty amazing like this. Many freely and unassumingly help others coming up in the industry. And for those of you who have been guiding and supporting me along the way, please know that you are gold and that I am forever grateful!

There is good news, I plan use this extra time while not teaching to find a different opportunity, hopefully still in the quilting industry that will eventually get me working directly with quilt people again but also one that will fill that void that I am presently feeling. And more good news, I not going to stop creating, I will continue my passion to make art quilts just as my motto states “Creating Art One Tiny Piece of Fabric at a Time” and I will happily continue to share my quilts with others at national quilt shows and venues, on social media and on my website.

Respectfully,

Heidi Proffetty

Mosaic Art Quilter