Alliance For American Quilts Inc

Quilters Take a Moment: QTM 2024 was the fifth event in the virtual series. This year we rolled the event into our membership benefits program, so only a small number of tickets were sold to non-member. The topics included photography, videography, labeling, and cataloging quilts. The goal is to recoup lost ticket revenue via membership growth over the next few years. Quilters SOS - Save Our Stories (QSOS) celebrated its 25th anniversary by releasing new guidelines for the grassroots project. Project manager Emma Parker created a presentation for QA members who will help pilot the QSOS relaunch. The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress continues to house the physical archives of the collection, and the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History continues to house and host the digital archives of the collection. Go Tell It at the Quilt Show! 2024 marked the 12th anniversary of this project to document and share stories of quilts where quiltmakers and quilt owners gather. The formula for Go Tell It! is simple: one person talking about one quilt in front of one video camera for three minutes. We continued the virtual collection of Go Tell It! interviews for various QA projects and events, some recorded via Zoom and others recorded and submitted by the Tellers. 121 Go Tell it! videos were shared via YouTube in 2024 with 7,307 total views. Textile Talks: The Quilt Alliance participated as one of four partner organizatoins in the fourth year of the Textile Talks lecture series. The QA presented 13 of the 51 talks presented in the 2024 season, and 5,967 attendees participated in these live programs. The recordings of each presentation were shared on the QA YouTube channel with 9,343 total views to date. Running Stitch, a QSOS Podcast: Host Janneken Smucker released three episodes of Season 4 of the Running Stitch podcast in 2024. The topic of season 4 is technology, and episodes included: The Industrial Revolution with Rachel Maines, The Electric Quilt with Penny McMorris, and The Rotary Cutter with Kritin Barrus. Downloads are estimated at 1,019 to dated (53k since the podcast launched).

Guild presentations: The QA continues to offer on-site and virtual education and outreach programs, offering lecture and quilt/quiltmaker documentation day services to quilt guilds, quilt shows, museums, and libraries. In 2024, staff gave on-site lectures and documentation days for the Amelia Island Quilters Guild in Florida and the Smoky Mountain Quilters in Tennessee. The Nimble Thimblers Quilt Guild in Massachusetts met via Zoom for a QA presentation. Emma Parker presented a paper about the Running Stitch podcast for the annual conference of the Oral History Mid-Atlantic Region. The QA served as a partner in the first Recharge & Reinvent Virtual Retreat for Quilt Guild Leader presented by the International Quilt Museum. QA staff advised on ticketing and Zoom production and presented one of the virtual workshops, How Saving Your Guilds History Can Ensure Its Future. National Quilting Day: The Quilt Alliance co-sponsors National Quilting Day each March, and in 2024, we held our fifth virtual celebration, asking quilters to hang quilts outside their home and post photos on social media with the tag #nationalquiltday. We were again treated to a day-long quilt show with quilts hung on homes, clotheslines, barns, fences,... in all kinds of settings.