The holiday season is in full swing, with all the twinkling lights, shopping bags, baked goods, and travel plans that come with it. To celebrate the season, we thought we’d take a look back at our QSOS interviews and feature some stories of holiday quiltmaking, family, and giving. Do you give quilts as holiday gifts? Or make quilts to accompany your holiday traditions? We’d love to hear more about how your holidays intersect with quilts–leave us a comment! We’ll start out with an excerpt from this interview with Kay Butler, about a Christmas Mystery Quilt. My favorite part of this story is that their mystery quilt group included a journal for each quiltmaker to write “the story of their lives.” What a lovely gift to include with a holiday quilt–a little note or journal that tells that quilt’s story (and of course, a cute label to go along with it!) Heather Gibson: Okay, tell me about the quilt you brought today. Kay Butler: Okay, this is a Christmas Mystery Quilt. We had a Mystery Quilt planned to do in our guild. There were four girls in the group. We were to select the fabric that we wanted, place it in a brown bag, and then pass it on to the next person in the group. And the next person would do a little bit more work, and it’s sort of like a “round robin” idea. And so I started this endeavor with a visit to a quilt shop here in Dover called Rose Valley Quilt Shop. I bought all of my fabrics there, in the Amish Shop, from a very dear friend, Rachel Hershberger. And I had in my head that I wanted a Christmas design. Normally I’m a real purple-lover, a real purple fan. But I thought, ‘I’m going to break from tradition here. I’m going to force myself to think in a different color realm here.’ And I chose what you see here on the end is called the “zinger” fabric. A lot of the quilters will buy a zinger fabric, and they will pull from that zinger fabric the various colors that are in there, like the reds and the greens and the golds that you see. So I bought the fabric. And in the brown bag we also include a journal. Each lady includes a journal, and they write the story of their lives in the journal. And what’s taking place in their lives, if they’re having difficulty with that step of the project that they’ve been doing. And that also documents the quilt and tells a little bit more about the quilt.     Judy Whitson of Tuscaloosa, Alabama talked about gifting quilts, both during the holidays, and year round. I love the idea of every gifted quilt being a memory quilt that remembers both the maker and the recipient (and all the more reason to label those quilts!). “I love to give. It is a sign that you really care for somebody when you give them a handmade item like a little baby quilt or a quilt for their bed or something, and it is more or less a memory quilt. I always put a signature block on there saying who it is for, the date, and who designed it and who made it, quilted.”       I also loved this interview with Resna Ximines Hammer  in Washington, D.C. about the ways she uses her quilts in her family’s holiday traditions. I can’t help but laugh at interviewer Evelyn Salinger’s question “do you actually use this on Friday nights yourself?” because I know I have a few quilted objects I’m a little hesitant to use. But Resna’s notion that a table should be beautiful, and that handmade objects can enhance a family ceremony, is a lovely sentiment for the holidays. Evelyn Salinger (ES): Good. Nice of you to come today with your things to show. Let’s start out first with your telling me what you have made here. Resna Hammer (RH): These are two–One of the things that I am actually very passionate about is Jewish ceremonial kinds of cloths. And this is called a Challah cover and it’s used to cover bread on the Friday night dinner. This particular one also I tried to incorporate all of the holidays that would come in the certain period of time. Here this is Hanukkah, this is the symbol for Hanukkah, this is Purim, which is another one, and the pomegranates are for the High Holy Days. ES: Do you actually use this on Friday nights yourself? RH: We actually use it on Friday nights. ES: Every Friday night or just on the holiday time? RH: Just on the holiday. I have another one for Friday. I believe that the table should be beautiful. And normally what your traditional Challah covers are usually silk and they are painted on and I thought what I wanted to do and what I’ve been doing, a wonderful quilted ones that I just think enhance the day and the ceremony. This also has incorporated in it the seven species, which is in the Bible and that are things that are all incorporated with Shabbes or to do with the Sabbath. What I’ve written here in Hebrew is, it’s like, ‘For all the Miracles that You Perform for Us,’ and ‘We Thank You.’ I wanted it every Friday night to be able to see that. We’ll end with some sweet words from Sue Stiner of Newark, Delaware. We all love to spend time with our fabric stash, but during the holidays, what could be better than spending time with our ‘stash’ of family and friends? “Most of the quilts I’ve made though, I’ve given away. But know that I’m building up a stash of grandkids along with a stash of fabric; I’ll probably be making more for family than I will for friends.” Happy holidays to all of you from all of us at the Quilt Alliance! Thank you for another year of sharing your quilts, your stories, and your gifts with us! -Emma Parker, Project…

In October of 1999, a handful of quilters and quilt scholars gathered at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas, to try something completely new: an oral history project focused on quilters’ stories, with members of the quilting community interviewing each other about their quiltmaking history, their proud moments, favorite techniques, their inspirations, frustrations, families, technologies, and communities.  Little did these volunteer interviewers and first interviewees know that the project–Quilters’ S.O.S. – Save Our Stories (QSOS)–would continue for another two decades, documenting the stories of over 1,100 quilters from around the world. It would include interviewees who’ve won some of the quilt world’s biggest prizes, to a six-year-old who recently finished her first quilt. Since those first interviews, QSOS has ensured that the diverse history of two decades of quiltmaking, in sewing rooms, international quilt shows, quilt shops, and community centers, has been captured.  At first, these stories were captured with cutting edge technology: the cassette tape! In 1999, the first interviews were recorded on tape, and laboriously transcribed by volunteer transcribers who’d write out every word and [laugh] and [pause for crying] in each transcript. Eventually, those transcripts would be posted online for anyone to read. Twenty years ago, that’s most of what you could do on the internet: read and look at pictures. Technologies for streaming audio and video were clunky and expensive at best. But fast-forward to 2019, and it seems practically quaint to encounter a web-page that’s just words. It’s not enough to bring you a transcript on a web page; we want you to be in the room where the stories are unfolding, to be transported to the living room or quilt show where these stories were captured, and to hear quilters tell their stories in their own voices.  You may have heard about our new initiative–to make the voices of the 1,100+ quilt stories we’ve recorded since the QSOS project began 20 years ago available online. It’s a big task, taking those Radio Shack cassette tapes and making them available for anyone in the world to hear. The tapes, despite their world-class storage conditions at the Library of Congress’ Audio-Visual Conservation Center, are aging fast. Each cassette needs to be digitized in real time, meaning that a 45 minute interview will take at least 45 minutes to play through and be recorded. Each recording is reviewed for quality and completeness, labeled correctly, added to a web server so we can beam it to your computer… and that’s all just to get it online! We’re grateful to have support from our partners at the University of Kentucky’s Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, who are working to digitize and prepare these interviews.  Despite the time and care it takes to make these recordings available online, it’s entirely worth it. The addition of audio transforms the experience of a QSOS interview. It offers nuance and emotion, textures and context that were entirely missing from the written transcript. Here’s just one example, from a 2011 interview with Venetta Morger. At the end of her interview, interviewer Sandi Goldman asked if she had anything to add. Venetta says: “I just know that four years ago when I started quilting full-time, having the time to quilt, my kids were all gone and off to school. I really dreamt that one day my quilt would hang in Houston. My quilt hung in Houston two years later in the special exhibits, with the Texas Guild exhibit that they do. I never would have imagined that it would have been picked as one of the best 200 quilts made in Texas in the last 25 years. But I hope that by having a dream, by encouraging others to have a dream, and making it big, that there’s nothing dreaming big. It’s absolutely the way that we can head towards a goal, and my next dream is to have a quilt in the winners circle here in Houston one of these days.” You can tell from the excerpt that she’s excited to be included in the exhibit. But when you listen to the recording, you can hear the pride in her voice. It’s a difference experience, hearing Venetta tell her own story, rather than reading it in your own voice, in your own head! Take a listen to this excerpt from an interview with Hollis Chatelain, talking about the influence of her time in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer. There’s so much that doesn’t come through in the transcript: you can hear the loudspeaker announcements that are still ubiquitous at the International Quilt Festival, you can hear the ease and familiarity with which she switches from English to French to provide a pronunciation of ‘palétuvier’, the French word for a mangrove tree. There’s a rhythm to her recollections of the African landscapes she’s drawing from that’s not represented by the flat words on a page. Even that loudspeaker announcement that interrupts Hollis’ interview is part of that interview’s story! It sets the scene for her interview at the International Quilt Festival and it’s not too far-fetched to think that future quilt researchers may find in that short announcement a little bit of context to better understand the quilt show landscape of 1999! In the same way, I love hearing this recording of Denyse Schmidt’s QSOS interview recorded at the 2012 Quilters Take Manhattan event. You can hear the hum of the audience and their laughter at times: this is an interview recorded in front of a large audience and though it’s hard to tell just from the transcript, it has a slightly different flow than an interview conducted between two women in a living room or quilt shop.  We’re so excited about all of the possibilities this newly-available audio affords us as a quilting community. Whether you’re a quilter who loves hearing others talk about their quilting journey, a women’s history researcher interested in crafting communities, a documentary maker, a family member eager to hear the voice of a loved one who’s passed away, we hope you’ll find something to treasure in these interviews. We’re thrilled to bring these quilters stories to you, in their own voices.  We’ll be working on adding new interviews as the audio is digitized, so keep your eyes on the project! If you’re interested in learning more about supporting the transition of QSOS interviews to their new platform, please check out our QSOS 20th Anniversary Fund…