by Amy Milne | Jan 14, 2022 | Jigsaw puzzles, News
Your Quilt Jigsaw Puzzle for January is below! Do you love the monthly Quilt Jigsaw Puzzle? We’d love to have you as a member if you’re not already on the team! We rely on the generous support of donors and members to sustain our projects. If you support our mission of documenting, preserving, and sharing the stories of quilts and quiltmakers, join us by starting and maintaining an annual membership, making a donation, or learning how your business or corporation can become a supporter of the Quilt Alliance. We thank our members regularly with special content like QSOS interviews and Quilt StoryShare events. Tip: for best results, solve puzzle on this page on a desktop computer or laptop. If you are solving on a mobile device, click on the puzzle piece icon in the lower righthand corner to solve on the Jigsaw Planet website. Welcome to another quilt jigsaw puzzle from Quilt Alliance! The beautiful quilts in our puzzles have all been entries in past Quilt Alliance quilt contests. Everyone Needs a Roof Over Their Head by Dort Lee This month’s puzzle spotlights a quilt titled Everyone Needs a Roof Over Their Head made by Dort Lee of Leicester, NC for the 2006-7 Quilt Alliance contest and auction, Put a Roof Over Our Head. Materials and processes: cotton, buttons, beads, embroidery floss, fabric markers, satin stitching, machine quilting Artist’s Statement I have a barn that is the exact shape of your house pattern. These are all animals that have lived in my barn at some time or other-all from original drawings by me.
…
by Emma Parker | Dec 10, 2021 | Go Tell It at the Quilt Show!, News, QSOS
This month, we have a little gift for you: seven hand-picked quilt stories from our projects, each one about the different ways we give quilts — and what quilts give us! As Tomme Fent says in her 2002 QSOS interview, I do think quilters are very generous. And quilters are so friendly. It’s like having a family connection the world over. You can go anywhere and find quilters, and just immediately strike up a conversation and have something to talk about. One thing I think is so great about quilting is what it’s done for me, and it’s also done for other quilters… Quilting is the most incredible creative expression. It’s a way of expressing grief, or joy, or love. You can just be as wild as you want or as conservative as you want. You can try something that’s totally outside your personality, outside the box. Or you can do something that’s just calming and relaxing. Tomme’s thoughts resonate with me as I think about what it means to give someone a quilt you’ve made. It’s not only the gift of a beautiful handmade object, but also the gift of time, attention, and memory. But Tomme’s quote also got me thinking about also what a gift it is to be among quilters. A diverse, resourceful, clever and–most definitely: generous!–group. Thank you for being so generous with your support and your stories this year. We can’t wait to keep celebrating quilts with you all again in 2022! Meg Cox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug9q_QpCpn4 Our first Giving Quilt story comes from Meg Cox, who tells us about the memory quilt she made for her granddaughter, Lucy. Jeanette Farmer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGV0360FzX4 In this Go Tell It! interview, Jeanette Farmer talks about a quilt she’s made for a local child experiencing homelessness. Making charity quilts to give to those in need is a perfect example of the generosity of quilters. Judy Whitson, QSOS interview Betty Jean Weaver, interviewer: Another question is how have you given quilts as gifts? Judy Whitson: Oh yes, 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. Starla Phelps https://youtu.be/5m9k_PE4-IM Starla Phelps made this quilt for her husband — and it was the very first quilt she EVER made! Eliza Hardy Jones https://youtu.be/jw_ZCYCmXhc?t=186 In season 3, episode 3, of our Running Stitch podcast, Janneken Smucker talks to musician and artist Eliza Hardy Jones about her quilts that interpret songs. They begin by talking about how Eliza began quilting: in the hopes of making gifts for friends and family. Steve Nabity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gXMkl0bNlw Steve Nabity, then-CEO of Accuquilt, shared the moving story of this graduation quilt, made for his daughter. As he says in the interview, “every quilt has a story. Every quilt. And don’t take it for granted, because every quilt means something”. Kim Van Etten https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt-pxkjsuO8 And our final Giving Quilt story: Kim Van Etten shares a quilt made by her grandmother, who gifted a quilt to more than 50 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. As Kim says in the video, “she’s the reason I quilt”. Kim still uses her grandmother’s sewing machine to make her own quilts. Want more quilt stories? Visit our giving page now for three great examples of the work…
by Amy Milne | Jul 11, 2020 | News, Running Stitch
The Quilt Alliance released the third episode of Running Stitch, a QSOS Podcast this week. If you’re already a subscriber, then you know that the first three episodes focused on First Quilts with guest Victoria Findlay Wolfe, Quilts and Activism with Thomas Knauer, and Quilts and Difficult Times with Melanie Testa. Host Janneken Smucker selects audio clips from QSOS oral history interviews conducted between 1999-2017, and invites the interviewees back to talk about how their quilts and their lives have changed since they were last documented by project volunteers. With a collection of around 1,200 QSOS interviews, more than 600 Go Tell It! video recordings and 30 StoryBee interviews, the Alliance has an abundance of content to draw from, documentation that spans decades and includes quilters from almost every US state and representing most sub-genres of the quilting community. Janneken, a Professor of History at West Chester University, and Emma Parker, producer and QA Project Manager, set out to create a podcast in which quilts and quiltmaking serve as a lens to examine some of today’s most pressing issues, including activism, public health, politics, race, and the economy. Janneken uses storyboarding to sketch out each episode, schedules and conducts the interviews, and records narrative, transition and credit segments. Emma uses the storyboard to retrieve clips, edits the episode together, and builds the episode webpages. The podcast was made possible by our partners at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History who recently completed the digitization of over 800 audio cassettes, the media of choice when QSOS was launched. In addition to digital audio, each interview is indexed with summaries, keywords and links. This important work, underwritten by individuals and businesses and a generous grant from the Robert and Ardis James Foundation, makes the collection infinitely more accessible and searchable for users. I have been fascinated by Janneken and Emma’s thorough and artful approach to working on Running Stitch and decided to turn the interview roles around and ask them a few questions about their work and their own podcast favorites. Janneken Q: You’ve been involved with the QA and the QSOS project since 2005 when you joined the QA board. Has doing this podcast changed your opinion about the value or utility of the QSOS collection to users? A: Working on Running Stitch reveals the depth and breadth of the QSOS collection. Now that we can search across interviews, thanks to the technology updates feasible through digitizing the collection and indexing it in OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer), we can discover hidden moments in interviews and find ways to put the interviews in conversation with one another. And as the episodes so far reveal, the interviews are extremely relevant to contemporary concerns that resonate well beyond quiltmaking. Running Stitch explores how quilts and quiltmaking relate to larger cultural issues, and this is only possible because of our archive of oral histories. Q: What are some of your favorite podcasts? A: I listen to way too many news and politics podcasts to get my fix of current events coverage, but in terms of more cultural fare, I recommend Wind of Change, which explores the rumor that the CIA wrote the song of that title which was a hit by the Scorpions, and proved pivotal in the waning years of the Cold War. I also like Slow Burn, produced by Slate, which used archival audio including oral histories as well as new interviews to explore historical topics, including Watergate and the Clinton impeachment. Similarly, Last Seen, produced by WBUR and the Boston Globe drew on historical and archival content to explore the unsolved art heist from the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. Emma Q: Your training is in folklore, and in your job with the QA, you are producing this podcast, as well as audio oral history and video storytelling projects. Do you have a preference for either audio or video as a storytelling medium when it comes to quilts? A: That’s such a hard question! I think both audio and video have so much to offer, but in different ways. Because quilt stories often have at their heart an actual quilt, I always love to be able to see the quilt and hear someone talk about it at the same time. The interaction we get in Go Tell It at the Quilt Show videos between the “teller” and the quilt makes those videos especially powerful! I often get a special understanding of how someone feels about a quilt by the way they hold it as they talk, or how they turn all the way around to point out that one piece of appliqué they’re most proud of. That said, there’s something really special about hearing someone’s voice. I’m always surprised by just how much comes through an audio recording, whether it’s a just-a-little-bit-longer pause or a nervous giggle that suggests what’s not being said. Some of our QSOS interviews really do feel like you’re in the room with the interviewer, or on the quilt show floor where that story was recorded and I love that audio recordings let you imagine what was going on on the other side of the tape. Q: And what are some of your favorite podcasts? A: I have to admit that my podcast consumption has fallen off quite a bit now that my big daily commute for work is from the back of the house to the front! As you mentioned, I have an educational background in folklore and linguistics, so I find myself drawn to podcasts that investigate the quirks of everyday life and language. Three of my favorites in that genre are 99% Invisible, Every Little Thing, and Lexicon Valley. Recently covered topics include a deep dive on the design of the classic American mailbox with a flag, how they decided on the typeface on highway exit signs and an exhaustive history of the word ‘y’all’. I love this stuff! I think Running Stitch listeners might especially like a short podcast mini-series called Articles of Interest, which focuses on the history of clothing, including a whole episode about pockets. And of course, if you’re not listening to Quilt Alliance board president Frances O’Roark Dowell’s QuiltFiction and Off-Kilter Quilt podcasts, hop on those! Subscribe to Running Stitch, a QSOS Podcast at: Apple Podcasts – Spotify – Google…
