When the ladies get together for a Quilting Bee and have a Hen Party, look out! Quilting is not a forgotten art in the hinterlands of America, and it's not some drab scrap thing. There are lurking and menacing implications in the quilting frame, but you have to know the lingo.

I'm not talking about the mass produced quilts where some lonely mill worker feeds great sheets of material into an ever hungry machine quilter. This is about hand quilting or home sewing machine quilting.

Here is a crash course overview: Quilting essentials (the basic ingredients), Different quilt stitches, Hand sewn insertions, Different types of quilting, Different types of quilt patterns, Quilting in the ditch, Contour and echo quilting, Random quilting, Tying a knot, tufting, Embellishments, and Binding.

Here are some types of quilt patterns: Rail fence, Log cabin, Crazy quilt, Pinwheel, Card trick, Star, Mariner's compass, Drunkard's path, Dutchman's puzzle (triangles), Trip around the world, Tumbling blocks, Flying geese, Secret garden, Dresden plate, Wreath, Celtic knot (bias strip), Tulip, Hawaiian applique, and Broderie Perse.

These are types of quilting: Sashiko, Italian, Trapunto, and Kantha.

Here are just a few stitches for hand quilting: running, whipped running, stem, Portuguese knotted stem, outline, chain, raised chain, knotted cable, twisted chain, rosette chain, zig zag chain, rope, feather, maidenhair, arrowhead, fly, fern, blanket, closed blanket, crossed blanket, whipped blanket, Basque, knotted blanket, Breton, glove, Vandyke, Wheatear, cross, Romanian, long arm cross, open Cretan, petal, Mountmellick, coral, cable, chevron, double knot, loop, and bonnet.

You should be OK, because I didn't tell you all of them.