The nonprofit Quilt Alliance launched StoryBee, a new interview show created for its members. The twenty-minute web-based program will profile notable people who make, collect, sell, study, exhibit and/or preserve quilts. In keeping with the Quilt Alliance mission to document, preserve and share the history of quilts, StoryBee will record conversations with interesting people from all corners of the quilt world and bring these stories to our members.   The Quilt Alliance is proud to feature Victoria Findlay Wolfe in the debut episode of StoryBee. Victoria is a NYC based International Award Winning Quilter and teacher. She was raised on a farm in central Minnesota, and learned to sew and quilt when she was just four years old. Victoria graduated from the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, Minnesota with a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art in 1993, and a year later moved to New York City. Victoria has an upcoming exhibit at the Iowa Quilt Museum opening April 17th (through July 29): Playing with Purpose: Victoria Findlay Wolfe Retrospective. Victoria Findlay Wolfe   Frances O’Roark Dowell, the host of StoryBee, is an author and quiltmaker and is best known for her “beloved books for tweens and teenagers” (New York Times Sunday Book Review). Since 2010 she has also hosted a popular podcast about her life as a quilter, The Off-Kilter Quilt, and in 2016 established a small publishing company to bring out a line of stories and novels especially for quiltmakers and quilt lovers. The quilting novel Birds in the Air was followed by the short story collection Margaret Goes Modern in 2017. Stars Upon Stars – a sequel to Birds in the Air – will be published in 2018. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband, two sons, and a dog named Travis. Frances O’Roark Dowell   StoryBee, Episode 1 will be available to the public through the end of February, after which a member’s login will be required to access StoryBee videos. Upcoming guests include: Alex Anderson, Carolyn Crump, Marin Hanson, Roderick Kiracofe, Carolyn Mazloomi, Luana Rubin, Denyse Schmidt, Julie Silber, Ricky Tims, and Nichole Wilde. Quilt Alliance members pick the membership fee that suits their budget, starting as low as $25, with the option to receive thank you gifts at each level. New and current Quilt Alliance members are encouraged to begin or renew their memberships by February 28, after which fees will go up 20% (the first increase since 2004, when the QA membership program began). One lucky QA member will win a special Valentine’s Bundle, sponsored by Victoria Findlay Wolfe Quilts, to be drawn on March 1. All current members as of February 28 will be eligible to win. Valentines Bundle Giveaway for QA Members Member support enables the small nonprofit, with one full time and two part-time staff members, to maintain and grow several important grassroots oral history projects. Projects include Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories (QSOS), archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Go Tell It at the Quilt Show! a short-format video project presented on YouTube, and the Quilt Story Road Show education and outreach program. For more information visit our membership page. The Quilt Alliance is proud to be sponsored by these generous companies. View our full sponsor list…

New Quilt Jigsaw Puzzle Welcome to this week’s quilt jigsaw puzzle from Quilt Alliance! We are creating new quilt jigsaw puzzles for you that are both fun to solve and inspirational, too!  The beautiful quilts in the puzzles have all been contestants or quilt donations in past Quilt Alliance contests and auctions. Be sure to sign up for our blog notifications, so that you don’t miss any of the upcoming puzzles. The Quilt Alliance presents a contest, exhibition and auction of small wall quilts every year. This key fundraiser supports our mission of documenting, preserving and sharing the history of quilts and their makers, and is an important opportunity to showcase and record the work of quilters in the U.S. and all over the world. You can browse the 2017 contest quilts here www.QuiltAllanceAuction.org to start picking out your favorites for our annual online auction that begins on Nov. 13, 2017. Good Morning by Nita E. Markos This week’s puzzle quilt is entitled Good Morning and was made by Nita E Markos of Hillsboro, Illinois for the 2017 Quilt Alliance “Voices” contest and auction. Nita used self-tinted fabric, applique, collage and oil pastel crayons on her piece.   Artist’s Statement The rooster makes me think of a visit to relations in a small Greek village in the mountians. Each morning we were awakened by a rooster crowing, then a dog barking, then a donkey braying. What a way to wake up. About Quilt Alliance We rely on the generous support of donors and members like you to sustain our projects. If you support our mission of documenting, preserving, and sharing the stories of quilts and quiltmakers, join us by becoming a member or renewing your membership, making a donation, or learning how your business or corporation can become a supporter of the Quilt…

When Hurricane Harvey brought historic flooding to large areas of Texas and Louisiana earlier this week, quilters all across the world began planning donation quilts. Quilters are among the most generous of artists, who routinely give away their work to comfort, warm and cheer the recipient, often someone they’ve never met. Quilt Alliance Oral History Program Coordinator, Emma Parker, looked into the Quilters’ S.O.S. oral history collection to find three excerpts that speak to this tradition of the generosity and care taking that quilters have provided for centuries. Irene Fankhauser, interviewed by Sharon Ann Louden in Tecumseh, Nebraska in 2009. SL: How do you think quilts are important for American life? IF: I think that quilts are [clears throat.] important to the history of America because the early settlers had to use pieces of material they had in order to make quilts they were utility quilts they had to make them to keep warm. My grandmother my dad’s mother made a quilt for her mother when their home was destroyed by a tornado and that was about in the late 1890’s or early 1900’s. Evidently the quilt passed on to another daughter who was a sister of my grandmother and a few years ago when she passed away her son gave it to me because she had put a note on there saying what had happened and that the quilt was made by my grandmother and so I got it kind of around the bush so I have that now too. Mitzi Wiebe Oakes interviewed by Nola Forbes in South Burlington, Vermont in 2009. MO: I did a lot of small quilts to get through the Katrina hurricane, where my daughter’s house was destroyed. She was in desperate need of having small quilts for the hospital. I made as many as possible. And also did the quilt guild. We sent, I think, over seventy quilts to New Orleans. MO: I do have trouble letting go of my quilts. They all represent something about my life or me at the time I do them. They really do tell a story about my life. Donna Sue Groves interviewed by Karen Musgrave in Columbus, Ohio in 2008. DG: I thought that it would grow, it would probably grow out throughout the Appalachian region, the thirteen states. Really never thought so much about the United States in 2001, and it growing that big, but what’s interesting is now that for the last seven years, and I’ve watched it go into Iowa and Missouri and Kansas and Indiana and Illinois and Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia. As I’ve watched it grow and participated in that growth, I’ve come to realize that what I didn’t realize before, that rural people, in our rural lands, the places that people settled with their families and on small farms, are truly the backbone of America, and that we’re not so different from one another. I never thought about Iowa up until 2002. I never really gave a lot of thought about Illinois or Indiana. Now, when I hear the news of the great flooding that’s happening in Iowa or along the Mississippi, now I reflect and think about those folks. My life always has been, tied to other states, counties, but now I think about how really really flat we are and how we’re intertwined and connected together. You can take one project, Adams County, Ohio for example; you could take our project in 2001, teleport it to Mason County, West Virginia, right now. They’re planning theirs. They have their first quilt square up. You couldn’t tell the difference except the names have changed and maybe the shapes of the barns. We’re all one family, in a sense. We all have similar dreams, hopes, and aspirations. KM: There’s power in quilting. I believe that. DG: There is power in quilts. Everybody has a quilt story. Everybody remembers a…