Press Posts

Check out the new podcast from Sam Hunter – Rev Craft Biz. Sam is a great interviewer and we covered a lot of ground in quilting and textiles and publishing. Available on most podcast channels.

Watch our Textile Talk – free on YouTube – for an oral history interview with Native American Quilter Susan Hudson. Susan creates beautiful story quilts about her history, her family, and her Navajo culture. Each quilt carries deeply embedded messages, and her quilts are incredible works of art. All Textile Talks are free and open to everyone.

When Eli Leon died, he bequeathed 3,000 African American quilts to the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. Some 500 were made by the famed artist Rosie Lee Tompkins. Teresa Duryea Wong interviewed Associate Curator & Academic Liaison Elaine Yau to get the inside story of how one mid-size museum became a major holder of thousands of quilts seemingly overnight.  Available on YouTube – free and open to everyone.

Textile Talks are free and open to everyone on YouTube! You can watch one I hosted with Carolyn Ducey, the International Quilt Museum Ardis B. James Curator of Collections. Take a walking tour through a pop-up exhibit of many different quilts from the collection. You’ll see one of the oldest known Indigenous quilts, iconic Hopi quilts, Navajo story quilts, and a Star quilt made by Lula Red Cloud. Lula Red Cloud is the great-, great-granddaughter of Oglala Lakota Chief Red Cloud. Learn the story of two Red Cloud Star quilts made 105 years apart!

TEXAS HILL COUNTRY: Lyle Lovett’s famous lyrics “You’re not from Texas, but Texas wants you anyway,” speaks to folks like my parents, who are not from Texas, but got here as soon as they could. I’ve been here my whole life.
I was born in Houston and spent my high school years in a small town not far from the Hill Country. True to my Texas roots, I learned to ride horses quite young, second grade in fact. After school let out, we’d run to my friend’s house and take off riding bareback, barefoot, and unsupervised. In junior high, I got my own horse and rode him nearly every day for the next 6 years. In high school, we worshiped Friday-night football and spent Saturday’s riding horses during the day and riding around town at night listening to rock and roll on eight-track tapes.
Quilting was not part of my life until much later, when I met a friend whose exquisite quilts gave me an awakening. I suddenly realized that quilts were art, and I wanted in.
Writing for Quiltfolk has brought me back to my early days as a journalist, and I love interviewing and capturing the stories of creative people! As a quilt researcher and author, I’ve interviewed Texas luminaries such as Karey Bresenhan and Kathleen McCrady, and Quiltfolk brought me back to Kathleen’s story when I got to hang out with her daughter-in-law, Rosie. Heck, thanks to Quiltfolk, I even got to spend an afternoon with Jane Dunnewold. Spoiler alert: we conducted our interview on her couch (which just happens to be upholstered in fabulous Jane Dunnewold fabric).
Traveling for the Hill Country edition also brought me back to the Texas Quilt Museum for a photoshoot with my quilt pals Kathy Moore, Kate Adams, and Suzanne Labry, who also happen to be scholars and authors like me. You’ll meet them too in the story about the Bybee Scholars.
I’ll never leave Texas. It’s my home and part of my identity. Quiltfolk made a brilliant choice to cover the Hill Country first. And when we come back to the Lone Star state for the next Quiltfolk Texas edition, I’ll be along for that ride too.