|
|
|
For Immediate Release
Friday, March 22, 2013
|
|
|
Contact: Amy E. Milne, Executive Director
|
|
|
More Texas Quiltmakers Interviewed for Q.S.O.S.
|
Asheville, North Carolina, March 22, 2013
 Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories (Q.S.O.S.), a Quilt Alliance project to document, preserve and share the oral histories of quiltmakers, has just released eight new interviews on its website, www.QuiltAlliance.org. The interviews were conducted in November 2011 during the International Quilt Festival (IQF) in Houston, Texas.
All 63 of the artists interviewed for this Q.S.O.S. sub-project are featured in the book Lone Stars III: A Legacy of Texas Quilts, 1986-2011 by Karoline Patterson Bresenhan and Nancy O'Bryant Puentes, two of the co-founders of the Quilt Alliance, and founders of Quilts, Inc., who produce three consumer shows and two trade shows each year. Their book, the third in a series, includes two hundred traditional and art quilts that represent "the best of the best" quilts created in Texas since 1986. A companion exhibition of quilts featured in Lone Stars III was on display at IQF in 2011.
 
   
 
In a Q.S.O.S. interview, the quiltmaker chooses a "touchstone object" (typically a quilt) that has special meaning to her (a first quilt, first commission, example of a specific technical mastery). The interview begins with the question, "Tell me about the quilt you brought with you today." Caryl Gaubatz shared the inspiration for her touchstone quilt with interviewer Donna Mikesch: "The quilt is called Redemption and the greater meaning is redemption comes when we love our children more than we hate our enemies. It was made after the Gulf War; I am a retired Army nurse and I was with the 41st combat support hospital during the first Gulf War, and we were stationed in both Saudi Arabia and Iraq."
Michelle Settle was interviewed by Helen Kamphuis, who traveled from her home in Holland to attend IQF and volunteer for this Quilt Alliance project. Michelle chose Bows and Arrows as her touchstone quilt for the interview. "I brought it because I drafted the pattern off of a picture that I saw. It gave me the confidence to make my own patterns, and to go off the beaten track and to do something on my own. So, I think that this quilt brought me to another level of quilting."
Kay Marburger told interviewer Cindy Dollar Brown about her touchstone quilt, titled Lafayette Hero of Two Worlds. "[It] was my very first quilt that I made starting from scratch. I live in Fayette County, in the town of La Grange [Texas.] and in 2006 the city of Lafayette, Louisiana, decided that the next year they were going to have a big celebration celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Marquis de Lafayette from France, after whom their city was named. One of the things they wanted to do was have a quilt exhibition and they were asking anybody, any town, any county with the name of Lafayette, Fayette, La Grange, because La Grange was the ancestral home of Lafayette, if they would make quilts and send them to this exhibit."
More than fifty volunteers served as interviewers, scribes, photographers and technical assistants during the interview process. Volunteer training was conducted mostly online through training videos and phone sessions. Many of the IQF volunteers have since made presentations about the Q.S.O.S. project for their quilt guilds or community groups.  | | Volunteers hanging EuJane Taylor's "touchstone" quilt in the interview booth at IQF. |
Q.S.O.S. was launched in 1999 at IQF with the support of Quilt Alliance board members, including Bresenhan and Puentes. That first year, 51 interviews were collected at IQF by volunteers and since then the Q.S.O.S. project has grown to a collection of over 1,100 oral history interviews with quiltmakers, from hobbyists to professionals. The 2011 interviews were sponsored by Quilts, Inc., Moda Fabrics, ArtCall, Leslie Tucker Jenison and the Dinner at Eight Artists.
The collection is archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Original audio recordings of the interviews are available there for listening, and written transcripts and images of the quiltmakers with their quilts are shared on the Quilt Alliance website. Sub-projects include interviews grouped by state, country, themed exhibitions, guilds and charity causes. Forty-three states and eight other countries are represented in the collection. Volunteers from all over the U.S. have used the downloadable Q.S.O.S. manual and training videos available online to learn how to conduct interviews with quiltmakers in their community for this growing project.
The nonprofit Quilt Alliance supports and develops projects to document, preserve, and share the history of quilts and quiltmakers. The Alliance brings together groups and individuals from the creative, scholarly and business worlds of quiltmaking to advance the recognition of quilts and their makers. Membership and volunteer information here: www.QuiltAlliance.org
|
|
The Quilt Alliance is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. If you no longer wish to receive e-mail from the Alliance, please follow the SafeUnsubscribe link below. Visit our Constant Contact signup page if you would also like to receive the Allliance eNewsletter, or if you have been forwarded this email from a friend and would like to begin receiving Alliance press releases.
|
|
|
|
|
|
