May 2013 Meeting Information

Hello Everyone!

I just wanted to provide some information about our May meeting.

As a reminder, we are meeting a week early this month, due to the Memorial Day Holiday.

Our meeting will be Saturday, May 18, at 10:00 am at the Ransom Public Library in Plainwell.

If you participated in our block challenge, please be sure to bring your completed blocks!  We'll be holding our drawing for them.  If you won't be there, be sure to send them with someone else or mail them in so that we can make sure you are in the drawing!

We have accomplished much in the past month!  We are a legal organization within the State of Michigan.  We have our EIN and nonprofit status.  We have bylaws.  This means we could open a bank account, which we did.  This means we can now accept membership applications!  We have membership applications ready to go!  Wow!  Lots happening!

In preparation for the meeting, here are a couple of downloads for you:

Membership Application (You can print one and have it ready at the meeting, if you'd like, or we'll have hard copies at the meeting.  We will collect full dues for this year--i.e., $25--even though we are at the half-year mark.  We really need some operating money to get us started.  I hope that's okay with everyone!  If you plan to be an on-line member only--that is you won't come to in-person meetings or sew-ins--you don't have to pay membership dues.  However, we'd still love to receive a membership application from you so we can keep you on our membership roster and keep you informed of events.  We'll give more information on that later.)

We will have membership cards ready for paying, full members of the guild.  And I've spoken to at least one local quilt shop (Quilts Plus; thank you, Quilts Plus!), who will provide a 10% discount on purchase to card-carrying members of the guild!  I'll be speaking with other quilt shops about this soon!

Bylaws (People wanted these early so they could look them over before our meeting.  Please download these and review them, if you'd like.  We'll be discussing and hopefully ratifying them at our meeting.)

This will be the last "business" meeting of the guild.  From now on, our meetings will be more "program" oriented!  Yay!  So, please come and help us finalize all of our plans!

Agenda:

1. Discuss and vote on bylaws.
2. Take membership applications and pass out membership cards.
3. Draw a winner for the block challenge we did last month.
4. Discuss committees, chairs, and members.  These are some suggestions:
   Membership Committee
   Program Committee (on-site and on-line--same or different committees?
   Sew-in Organizers
5. Discuss on-line activity for June
6. Discuss ideas for supporting our local quilt shops
7. Show and Tell!

I am looking forward to seeing you all on Saturday!

Stephanie
(AKA "The Big Kahuna")