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uesday I was the guest speaker for the monthly meeting of the Acadiana Quilters' Guild. What a wonderful group of folks, this quilters' guild! I was quite impressed indeed by their strong sense of community. It was a delight to spend time with them. My presentation topic fit in exactly: "K2tog: Redefining the Fiber Arts". It's something quilters have known for generations, more, I think, than practitioners of other fiber arts: this sense of community, of gathering together to "do art". Those of us who use yarn and thread predominantly as our artistic medium have for various reasons grown more accustomed to working in private or in our own family groups. The quilting bee on the other hand, has been around for generations, its members all preparing individual blocks to be assembled and finished by a group of helping hands all working together. Last Tuesday evening, a special quilt was given to the mother of a fallen soldier. The presenter explained that that particular quilt had passed through countless hands, each charged with some element of the quilt's completion. This phenomenon of gathering together with friends and neighbors is, in the scheme of things, rather new to us yarn people, but it's been a growing trend. The common knitting operation of "knit 2 together" has translated itself from the fabric to the community, as our fiber arts knit us all together. Just as a fine quilt carries the stories of the hands who fabricated it, so also our knitted and crocheted fabrics carry the memories, tales, joys, and tears shared in community while the stitches fall down into the textures of our patterns.
uesday I was the guest speaker for the monthly meeting of the Acadiana Quilters' Guild. What a wonderful group of folks, this quilters' guild! I was quite impressed indeed by their strong sense of community. It was a delight to spend time with them. My presentation topic fit in exactly: "K2tog: Redefining the Fiber Arts". It's something quilters have known for generations, more, I think, than practitioners of other fiber arts: this sense of community, of gathering together to "do art". Those of us who use yarn and thread predominantly as our artistic medium have for various reasons grown more accustomed to working in private or in our own family groups. The quilting bee on the other hand, has been around for generations, its members all preparing individual blocks to be assembled and finished by a group of helping hands all working together. Last Tuesday evening, a special quilt was given to the mother of a fallen soldier. The presenter explained that that particular quilt had passed through countless hands, each charged with some element of the quilt's completion. This phenomenon of gathering together with friends and neighbors is, in the scheme of things, rather new to us yarn people, but it's been a growing trend. The common knitting operation of "knit 2 together" has translated itself from the fabric to the community, as our fiber arts knit us all together. Just as a fine quilt carries the stories of the hands who fabricated it, so also our knitted and crocheted fabrics carry the memories, tales, joys, and tears shared in community while the stitches fall down into the textures of our patterns.
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