Quilts & Heritage
For some reason, when I started doing posts about crafting and charity, I thought I might run out quickly. Ha! Crafters are one of the more charitable groups of people I’ve ever seen, there’s always someone wanting to get involved and use his/her skills for someone else. Knitting/crocheting and quilting alone gives me an endless supply of possibilities, not to mention the folks who sell their goods for charity.
My recent rediscovery of my Amish-inspired quilts prompted me to take a look at heritage quilts and heritage projects about quilts. Quilts are a very versatile medium, capable of depicting almost anything in fabric and thread (and other mediums, too). They are also a very practical medium. Everybody needs a blanket, so in tough times when other sorts of means of expression were out of the question due to resource and time constraints, quilts were often the method by which people’s creativity shined through. Quilts were a way to make something beautiful, to tell women’s stories, to record and commemorate important events like weddings, to bring together varied groups for social interaction, and of course to use up scraps that couldn’t be wasted to boot.
As a once-frontier nation, American has a huge quilt history. In fact, quilting was really quite altered when it traveled here, and became something it hadn’t been before.
I’ve discovered there are some organizations dedicated to preserving the history of quilting. There are a lot of resources available through these organizations for learning about quilting. Today I’m highlighting the national Alliance for American Quilts. This is a treasure trove of information about quilts and quilters. The Alliance is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving quilt heritage. They run a variety of efforts designed to foster knowledge and preserve history. The operate in partnership with others, including museums, educational institutions and local quilt organizations.
The Alliance has A LOT of projects going, and has partnered with a number of organizations to bring this effort to life. I’m impressed at the variety of efforts and the real effort toward preservation and information outreach.
- The Center for The Quilt Online is the Alliance’s home for outreach and education.
- Quilters’ S.O.S. - Save Our Stories is a project to get and save the stories of contemporary quilters. Operated with the Center For The Quilt at the Center for American Material Culture Studies, University of Delaware.
- Quilt Treasures: is an oral history project about 1960s and 1970s quilters. Operated with the Center For The Quilt at the Michigan State University Museum and the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.
- Boxes Under the Bed™: is an archival effort targeting quilt ephemera - patterns, letters, and other related items. Pending partnership with the Center for American History, University of Texas.
- The Quilt Index is the educational effort of the Alliance, and operates alongside MATRIX, the Center for Humane Arts and Letters OnLine and the MSU Museum based at Michigan State University, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Illinois State Museum, the University of Louisville Archives and Records Center, the Tennessee State Library, the Library of Congress American Folklife Center, The Kentucky Quilt Project, Inc., and Quilts of Tennessee are all Index partners.
- H-Quilts is the forum of the Alliance for sharing information about the Alliance’s ongoing work. This effort is conducted with the American Quilt Study Group and MATRIX, the Center for Humane Arts and Letters OnLine.
Introducing Local Tier 2
For the last several days Jeff and I have been shopping locally. Remember when I said I was going to do that? Well, today is day four, and so far we’ve stuck to the plan, but we’re still mostly Fact Finding. As you can imagine, there are problems with doing this. It was part of the idea to figure out where the problems would be, and see how inconvenient shopping locally really is.
Going Out to Eat: chances are, this it isn’t a problem to find a local restaurant wherever you are. Or delivery either. Around here you can get local pizza and Chinese delivery, plus during the week people will actually bring you soup and casseroles. No kidding.
Grocery Shopping: this is more of a challenge. Locally, I thought we’d have more choice but it turns out our options are the farmer’s market, Wheatsville Co-op, Greenling organic vegetable delivery and Grape Vine Market (which is more liquor/specialty). I refuse to count Whole Foods, even though it started here and still has its corporate offices here.
Specialty Stores: No problem whatsoever to find coffee and tea. We have a local gourmet tea shop (Tea Embassy) and places to purchase specialty coffee too. Also, things like a haircut, boutique clothing, record shops (Waterloo!), all okay. We also have a really excellent local outdoor shop with great shoes, Whole Earth Provision company. Oh! and Vulcan Video and the Alamo Drafthouse for movies.
Bookstores, Coffee Shops: Austin’s fortunate enough to have a really great bookstore called BookPeople, and there are more coffee shops here than you’d think the population could support. So, good on those fronts. Without these things, I’d probably wither and die. I’m a total book/coffee addict.
Crafting: Near my house there are 2 local yarn shops and 2 bead shops. There are also some sewing/fabric stores and even a local upholstery/interior design fabric shop. However, if you want to do any other sort of crafts I think you might be out of luck. Also, pretty thin on local hardware stores - all we’ve got is the small boutique-y places.
Summation on day 4: it’s easy to get specialty items and fun stuff here, but not as easy to find the basics. It’s going to be difficult to find basics in a lot of cases, things like normal toilet paper, new socks for running, etc. We’re trying to decide what to do about that.
We’ve thought about instituting a “Tier 1″ and “Tier 2.” Tier 1 would be Austin local and Tier 2 would be Texas stores so it’s still somewhat local but we could still manage to live in a functional manner when the situation called for it.
Anyway, will report again next week with what’s happened, and whether we were able to get groceries!
Jewelry Frames
Another finished project! It’s not that I’ve been particularly busy, just sometimes all these projects I work on for a while sort of come together all at the same time. Big old feeling of accomplishment!
A while back, I read this tutorial of Allyson Hill’s where she made a frame that held jewelry for her niece, as inspired by Austin local Anne Marie Beard. I quite liked the idea, so I got a couple of frames and some odd pieces of scrap material from the quilt I made, and decided to try it out myself.
I’m not quite sure I like what I’ve come up with (particularly the decoration), but it was an interesting project, and it seems like it will be useful.
Instead of a piece of screen, I used a really wide weave cross stitch fabric to hang earrings on, and then attached hooks for all my necklaces to the wood. It was really the necklace-hanging I was interested in, and just a few spots for some of my more decorative earrings. I painted the wood, trying to make it look like found pieces, sort of antiqued. I lightened them, but the pictures make it hard to see the dark brown one, but you can see the fabric leaves and flowers of the other.
What do you think?
