With a backdrop of quilts displayed on the walls of the Arts Mosaic Gallery, the CPR Historic Centre buzzed with conversation as friends, family and quilt admirers visited at the artist’s reception Tuesday evening, July 9.
The occasion? Kerri McFadzean-Main’s very first quilt show there.
Main quilts around her day job as a lab technician for Virden Health Centre.
While she has been sewing ever since her husband Murray’s grandmother, Mona, gave her an old cabinet sewing machine, she didn’t take up quilting until about 10 years ago.
In fact, it was through her career that she came to quilting.
Main says, “A lab tech came here to work with us in Virden and introduced me to this thing called ‘quilting’ – a very precise, regimented and expensive hobby.”
She thanks Donna Coulson for drawing her to quilting and she says, “I love it! It’s addictive.”
MEETING FRIENDS
For 20 years now, Dr. Adi Schoeman from South Africa has been coming to Virden every summer for six-week visits. She has become fast friends with people such as McFadzean-Main in Virden, and so the quilt show was a destination.
“I met her the first time when we came in 1999. Every year I come, we see each other,” says Schoeman.
A medical doctor, Schoeman is known to many as she fills in every summer at the Virden medical clinic, relieving doctors who are taking their holidays.
What does she like about Virden?
With a beaming smile she replies, “I love it!”
Schoeman’s husband is an orange farmer in South Africa about an hour inland from Port Elizabeth on the south coast, and Schoeman practices medicine in a nearby small town.
Her Virden visits, although she does fill-in at the clinic, are a nice change. She says she finds some “me-time” visiting, sometimes late into the evening as friends catch up with each other’s lives, packing a year into the six-week summer visits.
