Welcome to January!
This year (2023) is the 10th anniversary of the McKinney Modern Quilt Guild. This year the blog posts each month will look at information about different aspects of the guild, and our first ten years. The first post is taking a look at the history of the national Modern Quilt Guild.
For those who are new to the guild, the McKinney Modern Quilt Guild is a member guild of a much larger organization: the Modern Quilt Guild. The MQG was founded in Los Angeles in 2009 by Alissa Haight Carlton (@alissaheightcarlton) and Latifa Saafir (@latifahsaafirstudios). The modern quilt movement had been gaining popularity on line through the Flickr group Fresh Modern Quilts and various individual quilter Instagram accounts through the early 2000's and this was the first implementation of an in person guild focusing on modern quilting.
Quilting has always been a social pastime, and as the guild grew, the founders were blogging about it and sharing information on social media. People in other areas wanted to setup local guilds and the MQG helped them start. Unlike traditional quilt guilds which are stand alone guilds, these member guilds are part of the MQG as well, and can participate in the MQG activities like the challenges and reference materials. The McKinney Modern guild has two membership levels available, one that gives membership in both the local guild and the national guild, or a local only membership which just makes you part of the McKinney group.
At this time there are local MQG chapters all over the world, as shown on the map below. The MQG separated the US into 4 regions, with the international chapters are region 5, and the MQG board includes a representative that is selected by each region. Texas is part of region 2.
