A spring into Fall

The women started quilting on Fridays again.  We set up a lovely blue one with blocks created by numerous people.  It will be a pleasure to decide how to quilt each unique design. No doubt it will take us through til November, and there are other quilts waiting to be done.  Thankful to have this pile as it is one of the many ways we raise money to maintain the Historical Village.

To begin this season off, the Tobacco Valley Board of History constructed a strategic plan to carry us through the next three years.  The Historical Village was first established in 1971 so now nearly fifty years old.  Forty-seven to be exact.  Forty-seven years of volunteers fundraising, getting old buildings painted, roofs repaired, exhibits set up, the museum open everyday in the summer.  A lot of accomplishments for an all-volunteer organization in a small town.  And now we want to plan well so that this can continue for your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  Darris, Lynda and Sally fine tuned suggestions from the entire board.  Some very exciting ideas that we will begin to work towards making a reality.

Sally will create History Suitcases that can be borrowed by schools and home school groups. Each suitcase will have artifacts, photos, books and other items that students can touch, read, examine and learn from.  We also decided to expand our outreach to the community as we begin doing more events at the Village starting this winter.  For you not to miss anything, get on our email list so you can receive quarterly newsletters. You can ‘like’ the Tobacco Board of History Facebook page as we will have updates there.  And of course we will be putting our quarterly calendar in the newspaper.

We are also building our lists of volunteers.  There are summer docents for the museum, quilters, archivists and individuals to help with small repairs and some grounds maintenance.  Obviously we need more.  People who like to help organize events, help get our calendar out, fix things that need fixing (yes, the teeter totter is on the list), do demonstrations in the summer of skills we don’t want lost.

And an archival room is in the plan!  This would be a space that is secure, temperature and humidity controlled and with a place for individuals to do research. This has been needed for some time and now we are ready to take it on – find someone to do the design, raise the funds to build it, and then move the files, boxes and other archival materials into the new space.  Once this is completed (remember this is a three year plan) it will open more room in the Fewkes store museum to expand the exhibits there.

We are definitely springing into Fall.

 

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It is an art

What do New York City, Gee’s Bend, Alabama and Eureka, Montana have in common?  Beautiful handmade quilts.  On a recent trip to the Big Apple, I was fortunate enough to see an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled Souls Grown Deep.  Part of this exhibit featured quilts from Gee’s Bend, Alabama.  In 1998, folk art collector William Arnett happened to be going through a small town in southern Alabama and noticed quilts on clotheslines.  They were so striking, he stopped to get information about them and eventually bought some.  Later he arranged for over seventy quilts made by the women in Gee’s Bend to be part of an exhibit that traveled nationally. They were shown in art museums from Washington, DC to San Francisco, from Houston to Boston.  There are books and videos about these quilts and the women who made them.  In 2006, the US Postal Service even came out with a set of postage stamps that featured images of the quilts.  So for me, it was a remarkable moment to stand in the Met and see six of them displayed.  I was so tempted to touch them, lift a corner to see what the back quilting looked like, run my fingers over the colors. But of course I didn’t.

Standing there brought so many thoughts and emotions about the women in Gee’s Bend, about the women who sew quilts in the Historical Village, about the fabrics used in all of these quilts, the friendships as quilters sit together sewing, the designs, the stitches, the talk.  Especially this time of year as fall sets in and the quilters at the Historical Village begin meeting on Fridays, we get into a rhythm that will take us through the winter and into spring.  Here in Eureka, those of us who quilt with this group are ready to start up again.  Whether our quilts will ever grace the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art doesn’t matter.  Mostly we want our stitches to be even and the knots hidden.