Yesterday, the Quilt Alliance published it’s Video Annual Report for 2013 (watch below). I love working on this project every year because I get to see not only how much we’ve accomplished and where we’ve been, but especially who we are. This Alliance includes quiltmakers, quilt owners and collectors, quilt historians, quilt shop owners and staff, museum and historical society folk, quilt industry representatives, archivists, teachers, lecturers, oral history buffs (to name a few), and our love of quilts and commitment to quiltmakers brings us together.

Leading off our video annual report is the voice of longtime Alliance member Michelle Flamer, a quiltmaker and an attorney from Philadelphia. In the video, Michelle reads the artist’s statement for her TWENTY contest quilt, titled “Blest Be the Threads that Bind.”

Whether we are old, young, black, white, “plain,” “English,” rich, poor, or quilt traditional or modern, we are all quilters united by that desire to create something wonderful from a lifeless pile of fabric! Blest Be the Threads that Bind celebrates Quilt Alliance’s twenty years of service to the American quilting community, a community that transcends time and endures even now in the 21^st Century.

75. “Blest Be the Threads that Bind”
Michelle Flamer
Wynnewood, Pennsylvania

Our members and the people we document through Quilters’ S.O.S. – Save Our Stories (Q.S.O.S.) and Go Tell It at the Quilt Show! interviews, and our partners and contributors with whom we work on the Quilt Index project, come from every corner of the quilt community. That diversity is what every nonprofit needs most. It is our mission to document, preserve and share the full spectrum of what has and is happening in the quilt community today, and having members and supporters with unique perspectives in this community and different gifts to share, fuels our mission.

This year, we started the year by documenting quiltmakers at the Modern Quilt Guild’s first “QuiltCon” in Austin, Texas and finished the year at the 39th annual (!) Houston International Quilt Festival, documenting exhibiting quiltmakers and sharing our mission with attendees. Thanks to the leadership of both of these shows for supporting our mission!  Our staff and board members also made presentations and collected interviews at guilds and quilting events all over the United States, including our own Not Fade Away Conference in Herndon, Virginia in July and our Quilters Take Manhattan event in September.

We end our 20th anniversary year feeling energized by this Alliance of passionate members, volunteers, partners and colleagues, and we ask for your help raise the necessary funds to continue our work, to continue to document, preserve and share the history of our community.

Please make a contribution today to add the financial fuel we need to continue and grow. You can make a secure gift online via credit card or Paypal or download our mail-in donation form here.  Every dollar donated through December 31, 2013 will be matched by an anonymous foundation, up to $15,000.

If your are a member of this Alliance, if you have attended one of our events, if you believe in what we are doing, please make a contribution. Any amount makes a difference.

With gratitude and love,

Amy E. Milne
Executive Director, Quilt Alliance
amy.milne@quiltalliance.org