Speed Dating for Quilters

Our quilting club holds a Christmas lunch as an end of year celebration.  (Yes, I do know it's March, it's just a reflection on how busy my brain has been lately!).  We paid a modest amount per head and booked a really lovely motel function room, ate good food and had a blast playing a few games.

Here's a picture of a few of us enjoying ourselves - Joy, myself, Mathea and Mathea's MIL (who doesn't quilt, but had a lot of fun anyway).

I organised one of the games - and chose speed dating for quilters!  It was designed to get people talking to others they might not know that well and learn something new about those that they did know.

Each table had eight place settings, four on each side.  I had all the women sitting on the left hand sides of the table as the 'sitters', all the women on the right hand side were 'movers'.  The sitters were given a sheet of paper with sets of questions.  The sitter and mover would ask each other the three questions in a set, write the answers down on the sheet and when I rang a bell, the movers moved on to the next sitter and they asked each other the next set of questions.  I only gave the sitters the questions, but you could give everyone a sheet of paper with the questions - whatever works.

There were three questions in each set.  I tried to mix in a quilting related question in each set, but the other questions were pretty random and fun - like 'tea or coffee?', 'how old were you when you had your first kiss?' And 'if you could be an animal, what would you be?'

I ran the bell about every 90 seconds, but I probably should have given them 120 seconds, which would have given them a little more time for moving places.  And here is a tip, if you have participants who have mobility difficulties, get them sitting on the 'sitters' side of the table.  It was noisy, busy, a little chaotic and a lot of fun!

I've written out the questions in a google doc for you to use if you want to organise something similar for your club.  There are 14 sets of questions, which was enough for 28 participants.  If you had more, you'd have to either write more questions or not have everyone meet everyone else.  

This would be a fun game to play at a retreat or any other function where you need introductions.  During the rest of the afternoon, I would periodically read out some of the answers and we had to guess who had written them.  It made for lots of laughs!

Here's the link for the google doc:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oow85bWgwnZLqQjx6JWeNHnJr6GJiBI3ALsTGxkKhco/edit?usp=sharing