A Visit from the Oakland Museum

It was fun having Mia Pond from the Oakland Museum of California come out to meet with us at the meeting in November. She came to share information about the Yo-Yo’s and Half Squares show at the museum. It’s a really fun show built around the collection of Eli Leon, a Bay Area quilt collector, curator, and author. Check it out while you still can! (It closes on February 21.)

Mia was also there to feature the East Bay Modern Quilters in the OMCA’s Local Maker feature. It was really wonderful to hear fellow East Bay Modern members share why quilting and our group in particular are so meaningful to them.

For this week's #LocalMaker spotlight, we met up with the East Bay Modern Quilt Guild for one of their monthly meetings! The group meets up once a month to share progress on projects, and exchange skills, knowledge, and experience. From a member: “Quilting is such a social endeavor through history with the quilting bees, when everybody had to hand quilt everything. There’s obviously something about the quilt that when I’m sitting there hand-quilting, I feel so connected to all the women over the hundreds of years, who have been sitting there in chair, under the best brightest light that they have, at night, stitching. That’s been going on for so many hundreds of years. And when I’m knitting and crocheting, I don’t really feel that connection with people that have been knitting or crocheting. But when I’m quilting, I really think about that. There’s something about quilts that it’s not just a blanket, it’s so much more.” #MuseumOfUs #OaklandQuilts #EBMQ #makerstory #BayAreaMade

A photo posted by Oakland Museum of California (@oaklandmuseumca) on Nov 25, 2015 at 3:26pm PST