Quilt Alliance Member eBurst
Thank you for helping save the stories of quilts & their makers for three decades!
Love is in the air. And online!
Dear Members,

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and it’s got us thinking about love! So this month, we wanted to share our love for QSOS, our flagship oral history project. We’ve got some exciting things in the works for the Quilters’ Save Our Stories project that we’re looking forward to sharing more about, but if you’ve just joined us recently or haven’t heard of it before… keep reading! We want to share with you a little bit of its history, its big milestones, and a few reasons we love this project. If you love quilt stories as much as we do, we hope you’ll consider supporting our oral history work with a donation (read on for a sweet Valentine’s fundraiser happening this week!) or volunteering from home to help us bring more stories of quilt love into the spotlight.

We’ve got a few other exciting things coming up to help us celebrate 30 years of the Quilt Alliance, including sharing with you 30 Quilt Stories for 30 Years, and our very first (drumroll, please!) Block of the Month project! Look for more about both of these celebrations very soon, on social media and here in your inbox.


My warmest regards,
AEM firstname signature
Amy Milne
Executive Director
Be Our Valentine!

Love is in the square this week--come share your quilting faves with us! Tap on our Instagram story to take part in an unofficial and wildly unscientific series of polls to find out what our community is passionate about. Every vote raises money for the QSOS project fund to support new interviews in rural Appalachian communities this spring.
A few spots still available to demo in our booth at QuiltCon
The Quilt Alliance will host a Quilt Labeling Lounge at QuiltCon 2023 in Atlanta and we're seeking makers to demonstrate creative and effective quilt labeling. This is a great way to promote your own work while helping us emphasize the importance of labeling quilts. Join us and give a 30-minute demo/show and tell.
Community Quilt Days in Appalachia
The Quilt Alliance and community partners will present a free series of Community Quilt Days in Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee and Eastern Kentucky from March-May, 2023. Activities will include a quilt talk and open house, hands-on quilting for beginners, tips and demos from quilt labeling to care and storage. Quilt Documentation Sessions will be offered at each site and all quiltmakers and quilt owners are invited to bring in their quilts to be photographed, videotaped and labeled. Quilt historians and educators will be on hand to assess the pattern, likely origin and age of quilts. 

Support for this project is provided by South Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council and contributions from quilt lovers like you.
Would you like to volunteer to help handle quilts, take notes or assist with quilt labeling at a Community Quilt Day event? Contact Quilt Alliance staff!
Mark your calendar for Textile Talks

The Textile Talks series features free weekly presentations and panel discussions from the Quilt Alliance, International Quilt Museum, Studio Art Quilt Associates, Surface Design Association and many guest organizations. Join us!

Feb. 22 Quilters’ Save Our Stories (QSOS) interview with award winning modern quilter, fiber artist and workshop teacher, Carole Lyles Shaw. QA Project Manager Emma Parker will present the QSOS interview with Carole and explain why every community should use this grassroots documentary project to save the stories of quilters.


Looking Back:
Quilters' Save Our Stories

Quilters’ Save Our Stories (QSOS) is our longest-running oral history project, collecting long-form interviews with quiltmakers across the country and around the world. The grassroots project was started in the fall of 1999 by a passionate group of volunteers. Since then, we’ve collected more than 1,200 interviews about the life and times of quiltmakers, including their processes, their perspectives, their creativity and their challenges. Over the years, exciting QSOS milestones have included:

A few years ago, we began two major initiatives to re-think the entire QSOS project: we started planning updates to the QSOS guidelines in order to bring the project into the digital age, and began moving the collection to a new website and platform. That new software allows visitors to hear audio quiltmakers in their own voices, and to navigate using interviews through summarized interview segments. This work is not easy, as it requires a trained oral history “indexer” to listen to and reflect on the themes and keywords in each interview. The process of migrating interviews into this new system has been slower than we originally anticipated, and has meant that the collection is difficult to search and explore while it’s split between two websites. 

Getting these interviews finally under one digital “roof” is an all-hands-on-deck effort! We put out a call for volunteers in our last newsletter to help us add transcript-only records to our new QSOS site while interviews await their final indexed audio -- and our readers stepped up! In the past month, our virtual volunteer corps has moved almost 150 interview transcripts to the new site. A big thank you to Alice, Angela, Cynthia, Carol, Deb, Helen, and Susan for their work on this project so far. Would you like to lend a hand from home? All you need is a computer with an internet connection and basic computer skills. If you can do a web search, navigate more than one open window or tab, and copy and paste with ease, that's all you need!

We’re looking forward to several QSOS milestones in 2023, including the re-launch of the updated QSOS project, a brand new season of Running Stitch, a QSOS podcast, and joyfully returning to a single, searchable online home for all 1,200+ interviews. If you’d like to help us with these goals, consider making a donation, signing up to be a virtual volunteer, or simply taking the time to explore the new QSOS site and spreading the word about this beloved project.
Individual Members and Donors
Guild/Shop Members
Major Sponsors