Little did Sarah Bond know in 1979, when she started making her first quilt, that she was sitting on top of a gold mine of strikingly rare quilts. My guest Sarah Bond does not hide the explosion of emotions she had when she discovered the treasure chest of quilts in the basement of her house. It was a magic moment, and her desire to trace the history and story of those quilts connected the invisible threads of time and the artistic revelation that happened in her family during the dark times of slavery. The “Threads Across Time” episode with Sarah Bond travels through time to more than a century ago and brings back a legacy of Quilt art by her enslaved ancestors. The fact that Sarah Bond still preserves those quilts portrays that they were not created just for utilitarian purposes. They were a product of love and expression. As she says, “Those quilts are the physical manifestation of their struggle and victory".
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Learn more about Sarah!
Trailer for Quilt Show episode aired June 20
Article on the Schweinfurth Exhibit.
Her exhibit at the Schweinfurth.
Learn WITH Sarah! THIS WEEK!
Her online class at the Schweinfurth. Coming up July 31-Aug 1. STARTS THIS SATURDAY!
Sign up for Sarah's in-person class at the ATLANTA QUILT FESTIVAL --August 20, 2021 Learn to create a dynamic quilt with movement and a touch of three-dimensional illusion by combining color and contrast with angles and orientation. Master quilter Sarah Bond will teach you how to make her Diamond Stairstep quilt. The class will be held at Southwest Arts Center, 915 New Hope Road, Atlanta, GA 30331 from 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Lisa Woolfork 0:17
Hello stitchers -- Welcome to Stitch Please, the official podcast of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black lives matter. I'm your host, Lisa Woolfork. I'm a fourth generation sewing enthusiast with more than 20 years of sewing experience. I am looking forward to today's conversation. So sit back, relax, and get ready to get your stitch together.
Lisa Woolfork 0:47
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Stitch Please Podcast. I am your host, Lisa Woolfork, joining you from Charlottesville, Virginia. And I know I say this every episode, but we are talking with an amazingly special and wonderful person today [about] something we have talked about a little bit, but not enough in my opinion and that is the ancestral practices of quilt making and of quilting. This woman that we are going to speak to today is hard to summarize -- Sarah Bond and all that she does, and brings, and represents. Not only is she a fantastic quilter in her own right with 40 years of quilting practice under her belt. She also is a megaphone, in some ways, for her ancestors. She is the person who is keeping these stories alive. She has that rare ability that many black folks -- speaking for myself -- are denied in terms of tracing back her ancestors to a particular moment with a particular people and a set of circumstances. And not only knowing their story, but having access to the art that they created in quilting. So she's here -- she's got a brand new exhibit that's going to be coming out starting at the Schweinfurth in Upstate New York. It's called Threads Across Time. This is why the episode is called Threads Across Time because Sarah Bond is bringing these threads across time -- she is helping to shape the past, present, and preserve the future of quilting, and we are honored to have her here today. Welcome Sarah!
Sarah Bond 2:23
Thank you so much, Lisa, I'm so thrilled to be here.
Lisa Woolfork 2:26
This is such a delight. I am super excited. We know that you are a quilt maker with lots of experience. We know that you specialize in traditional, but also with this gorgeous modern touch. Can you talk a bit about how you got started? I read that 1979 was a big year for you in the beginning of your quilting career. Can you talk a bit more about that?
Sarah Bond 2:46
In 1979, I made my first quilt. That first quilt was made in an era when we didn't have rotary cutters, and a mat, and big rulers. I made this quilt with cardboard, and a pencil, and some scissors, and an old sewing machine, and I used fabric that I had leftover from garments that I had made. I was sitting in the sewing room, or the guest room in my house. My mother came in and she said, "What are you doing?" And I said, "Oh, I'm making a quilt." And she said, "why?" And I said, "I'm not really sure exactly why, but I really feel like I need to make this quilt. I feel this is my mission. It was a summer between years in college. I was determined and so I made this quilt, pieced it all together, and sandwiched it with that lovely 1979 polyester batting and hand quilted it and took it back to school with me in the fall. I didn't really know at that time when I was making this quilt, all of the stories about quilting in my family, but I still felt this push, this creative encouragement from somewhere to make this quilt.
Lisa Woolfork 3:56
We were speaking earlier and you identify yourself as a self-taught quilter. This was long before YouTube, long before everyone had a book, or techniques, or special rulers, or, like you said, rotary cutters. Even, like, in terms of the sewing industry, like, home sergers, for example, these things weren't there either. It was a different time. And yet, you managed to create a beautiful quilt and felt this kind of knock at your heart saying, "hey, you can do this!" Can you talk a bit more about that?
Sarah Bond 4:29
As I was growing up there were quilts on the beds and I didn't really think that much about it. My mother had a double wedding ring quilt on her bed and there was an applique quilt that looked like a Carolina Lily on the guestroom bed. And there were various quilts on beds in the house and I never really knew, you know, who had made them -- where were they from? I asked my father eventually about it, and he said that his grandmother Louvinia had made these quilts. Eventually I got the story between talking to him and also, I did some stuff on Ancestry and actually it's amazing when you know a little bit how much you can actually find. And so Louvinia was born in 1858. It really wasn't until a couple years ago that it struck me that she was born in 1858 and I was born in 1958. So here we are exactly one century apart, working together on these quilts. Louvinia had two daughters, Bertha and RosaBelle. RosaBelle was my father's mother. I never knew Louvinia -- she died in 1943, but I didn't know RosaBelle. The whole story that my father told me was that RosaBelle and Louvinia didn't really get along that well and RosaBelle always felt that Louvinia preferred Bertha, who was the older sister, so when Louvinia died, RosaBelle went over and got all the quilts before Bertha could get there. And so there were these quilts on the beds that I had known, but little did I know that when we went to clean out the basement, that we would find another 10 quilts down there that had been made by Louvinia, or maybe people before Louvinia. It was like my father was still hiding them from Bertha. It's so funny how these things in families persist, even if they're not completely intentional. But there were those quilts down there. I grew up in Chicago, and after my father died, she moved to Philadelphia. And as she was cleaning the house, she called me and she said, "Hey, I found all these ratty quilts in the basement, you don't want these do you?" And I said, "Okay, you need to back away from those quilts, put them in a nice box, and bring them with you because I need to have those quilts." And there were a whole bunch of them. And a couple of the ones that I found most striking were these Lone Star quilts that Louvinia had made. And one of the things that really impressed me about them is, you know, you hear all these stories about how quilts were made from necessity, and women cut things up, and there was really no design process at all, they were just trying to keep people warm. But what struck me about these things that she made is that they were so clearly a product of love, and an expression, I mean, from an iron will to express herself because, I mean, a woman born in 1858, born into slavery, lived in the South her whole life -- Orangeburg, South Carolina -- clearly, I mean, I'm not saying she had a terrible life, but I'm sure she had challenges. And yet, within all of this, she managed to put together these just amazing quilts. And so I decided, at one point that I wanted to spend some time working in a series around these quilts. And so I made a bunch of Lone Star quilts and then I started to sort of deconstruct them from a design perspective. So I made one quilt where the points instead of pointing out are pointing towards the center of the quilt, and so that was my inverted star. And then I made one where the blades of the star are sort of dancing across the quilt laterally, rather than being in a circle. And then I moved from that by taking those blades that are at those angles and splitting those rows of diamonds apart so they're just sort of following each other in two different directions down the quilt. So I've worked on these for a while. And it was really amazing to me again, just like in 1979, I, you know, I felt like, I mean, she wasn't speaking words to me, but there was a communication and it made me feel full that we were both working on these same quilts and her name would be repeated again, now, 100 years later, because of this work.
Lisa Woolfork 8:42
And I love that when you mentioned [that] her name would still be spoken because I think that forgetting is so harmful. It can feel so violent. To be erased from memory is so destructive, and it's harmful because the folks who come afterward could really benefit from knowing that there was someone that came before because it makes you feel, like, less isolated. And so, when you talked about [the fact] that you were able to see the artistry in her work, I appreciate that because I agree. Anyone born in 1858 is going to have challenges that are incredibly different from anyone born in 1958. That's just history, like, so much has changed between these two time periods. But for black folks, a lot of things are similar. And so this notion that -- I was just talking with someone about this -- that the idea of leisure time, and like who was allowed to have leisure, who was allowed to do things just for the joy and love of them rather than turning them into an income stream or revenue generating thing, right? That, "oh no, no, you're too poor, to create beautiful things. You're too marginalized to express yourself through the creative arts. Instead, you should be bootstrapping yourself to death," you know, "work as hard as you can every minute of the day until you can get another little tiny corner of the capitalist crumbs." And it just shows us that even for black women born in 1858, that had, like, no rights -- they legally had no rights compared to what we have today -- to manage to design a quilt with something beautiful in mind -- that is such a radical act.
Sarah Bond 10:27
And it is. There's a quote by bell hooks, and I can't recall it verbatim, but when she was speaking about her grandmother and quilting, and how her grandmother took to this craft, and she, you know, spent her fair share of time working on it. Her grandmother said that that was an opportunity after spending all the time keeping house, and having children, and teaching children, and clothing children, and raising children, and caring for elders, and caring for spouses, and all of those things that are women's work -- that the quilting with her and the group of women that she quilted with -- that was the time when she could come back to herself and speak to herself and speak to her own needs -- how quilting was not just a utilitarian thing, or just an activity, or a hobby, it was really this coming back to oneself and spending time to know oneself. I mean, clearly, we're still doing that today, because that's the time we take for ourselves. And, "don't talk to me, I'm quilting," you know, it's still the same.
Lisa Woolfork 11:36
Again, this idea that, I think in our day and age, here speaking in 2021, that capitalism has somehow distorted into a self-care industry, right, that you can get a box for self-care, you can buy a shampoo for self-care. But what your ancestors have demonstrated is -- and, like, as bell hooks was talking about [with] her own grandmother's quilts -- is that in a world that is so deliberately hostile -- in a world where your boundaries, your limitations, are forced upon you externally, either through slavery, through Black Codes, through Jim Crow, through all of these other things that American racism throws up, right, to prevent Black people from having mobility -- the one thing we have always been able to control is our own thoughts and our own hearts and our own vision. The genius to recognize and allow for finding ways to deliberately care for ourselves is just a strategy for thriving in a world that wasn't built for you to do that.
Sarah Bond 12:44
And the amazing thing about quilts and quilting is that those quilts are the physical manifestation of that struggle and that victory.
Lisa Woolfork 12:56
The physical manifestation and you have them! You can touch something that was made by someone who was born in 1958, but also before that, because you were talking earlier about your ancestor, Jane Arthur Bond, like the first person who has been recorded in your family history -- her being held or enslaved by this family. Could you talk a little bit about that -- about how you discovered your prime ancestor and the work that she did?
Sarah Bond 13:25
Absolutely. And this was completely by mistake. You know, I took up quilting. And then as one does, began to accumulate fabric and books, and back then it was a little bit different because there wasn't the internet and we weren't on Facebook sites or anything like that. So you would walk into a fabric store or a quilt shop, and you'd look in the bargain bin to see what the books were, or you'd go to the bookstore and find the four or five books on quilting that were in the whole store. And so I found this book. It's called Stitched From the Soul, and it's by Gladys Marie Frey and it's all about quilts that were made by slaves. And so I was looking through this book, and all of a sudden I see Jane Arthur Bond. And I said, "now wait a minute." I knew about Jane, I knew that she was our matriarch. She had two sons, James and Henry. And in our family, you're either a James or you're a Henry. I'm a Henry. Henry was my great grandfather. And so I knew about Jane, but I didn't know this quilting story about Jane. And so I'm looking through this book and looking at these quilts, and there's this picture of Jane and she's fixing the hair of this young white girl. Then there are these pictures of these quilts and it turns out that this young girl in the 1880s or whatever, was a diarist. And she wrote about her everyday life and one of the things she wrote about was Aunt Jane, and she wrote about how Jane made quilts with her mother, Rebecca, and there were these pictures of these quilts. I was astonished because I, you know, I knew I was interested in quilts. I really didn't know anything about any other family history about quilts. I hadn't gotten schooled on Louvinia at this point. I said, "this is fascinating and where are these quilts?!" Because I've never seen these quilts. I don't know anybody who has these quilts. So I wrote to the author and asked, "Where are these quilts?" And she never wrote me back. And I thought, wow, that's really irritating. Then, in the course of life, my family has these reunions right. My first reunion I went to in 1996 and I met lots of family that, you know, I hadn't met before. And, you know, in the course of discussion, and whatever, it came up that Emma was the person in our family who did all of this genealogy. You know, she kept up with these things. And, you know, again, even then, it wasn't, "Oh, let me log on to Ancestry.com." It was, you know, you're on this message board, and you're messaging back and forth with people I don't even know. But she made contact with this woman, Catherine, who was the granddaughter of the girl in that picture, and come to find out, subsequently, this woman knew all about Preston. I mean, people on our side knew about Preston too, but she knew all about Preston, because that was her great, great whatever. You know, she referred to him as the rapist because he was so -- I guess I did not say that Jane was born in 1828 in Anderson County, Kentucky, and she was given as a wedding gift in 1848 to Belinda who was the daughter of the family and she went with Belinda when Belinda married Preston Bond, and we know that Preston fathered at least two children with James, who was born in 1863, and Henry, who was my great grandfather was born in 1865. And Henry was the first one in our family who was born a free person because, even though James was born after the Emancipation Proclamation, the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to slaves in Confederate states and Kentucky was not a Confederate state. So anyway, I looked in this book, and I talked with Emma about it. She said, "Oh, well, I know this woman who knows the genealogy on that side," and it turns out, she is the granddaughter of this girl and she has all the quilts. So I think it was in, oh, gosh, maybe 2004? I can't remember 2002? But Emma and Catherine, you know, talked back and forth and Catherine sent one of Jane's quilts one of these quilts that she had to one of our reunions for us to, you know, sort of commune with. But she sent this quilt and that's the first time that I ever touched anything that Jane made. So I made it my business to know this woman. I flew down to Florida, and visited her and these quilts, and I invited her to our reunion in 2008, which I hosted in Philadelphia. So she came up and she brought this basket quilt, and she offered it to auction to support the reunion. And I got it. So I now own that quilt, which is so amazing.
Lisa Woolfork 18:10
And so what is the date on that quilt? Is there any like way to estimate about when you think your ancestor made that quote? Is there any way to tell a year or anything?
Sarah Bond 18:20
Well, I talked with a couple of people. I talked with Liz Porter from Fonts and Porter. So I took this class at the Quilt Fest in Philadelphia with her and I took the book with me and I said, "You know what about this quilt and blah, blah, blah." And she looked at it, she said, "because of the photograph in the book, it's hard to tell what the pattern of the quilt is because different parts of the pattern faded differently." So you could tell that she used different kinds of blues and different kinds of reds because some of them faded out completely and some of them were still there. So by looking at the various different blocks in the quilt, she helped me figure out that this was a basket quilt. I actually did remake that quilt in red and blue sway sway then offered that at one of our subsequent reunions. So a cousin of mine has that quilt now. That's how I found out sort of what the pattern was. And then subsequently, I took another class with a historian of fabric and quilts. So I talked with her and she said I know this book says antebellum quilts, but this quilt based on the fabric is from sometime in the 1880s. And that follows with what I know, [which is that] she made this with Rebecca after the end of the war and she went back and she worked for Rebecca. I'm thinking somewhere 1880 to 1885 --something like that.
Lisa Woolfork 19:40
It's absolutely amazing. So we talked about Jane and this wonderful matriarch that you have and you know her story, you know that she was a woman who was owned by a rapist and that this is something that was incredibly common during that time period. And as you go forward, I keep thinking about your other ancestor, Ruth Clement Bond from 1934. Like that quilt.
Sarah Bond 20:06
I have to be clear -- Ruth is not a direct line to me, but I always have to include her because her work was so amazing. She you know, had an amazing life of seeking social justice and all kinds of, I mean, she was even without any quilts, she was amazing.
Lisa Woolfork 20:25
Black Women Stitch and the Stitch Please Podcast are happy to announce that we have another way to connect with our community. In addition to the IG lives that we do every Thursday at 3pm, we also now have a club on Clubhouse! That's right friends, they done messed up and given me the chance to have a Club! Follow Black Women Stitch on Instagram and now on Clubhouse. Thursdays at 3pm on Instagram at 3:45pm on Clubhouse Eastern Standard Time [EST], it will help you get your stitch together.
Her husband worked with building the dam and even in Chicago, even in the north, or the west, or in certain places, segregation required that you couldn't have Black and White folks building a dam together -- goodness forbid if that happened. So Ruth's husband supervised the Black workers. The quilt that she made, I mean, that -- I don't know. I would love to see it. Could you show us again? I think you might have shown it.
Sarah Bond 21:32
So here is the picture of Ruth. And Ruth married Max. Max was one of Jane's grandsons. So he got his PhD in Sociology, maybe, at the University of Chicago sometime in the late 20s. And he got a job in 1934, I think, supervising the workers at the Tennessee Valley Authority. And so he supervised the workers and Ruth went with him. And she worked with the women in the camps where they lived. And she was not a quilter herself. She was not a needle worker. But she designed this quilt. It's called the Lazy Man. There's all sorts of imagery here. There's this lightning bolt sort of thing here, which I think represents the power of electrification. And then here there's this music that he likes, you know that he plays and then here are the police.
Lisa Woolfork 22:29
Oh, I didn't even notice that that was a police hand grabbing him.
Sarah Bond 22:33
Yeah, you can look this up, you can find this quilt if you want to look at it more. So anyway, this quilt was sewn up by Grace Reynolds Tyler. This quilt now hangs in the headquarters of the Tennessee Valley Authority. And in the year 2000, when -- I think it was Quilt National -- I don't know, but folks got together to choose the 100 best quilts of the 20th century and this was one of the quilts that was chosen. So many people, you know, are familiar with this image and it's very well loved. She did a few others, too, in this book. This also is a great book, Soft Covers for Hard Times. It's all about the depression. Mary Kay Waldvogel, who lives in, I think she lives in Tennessee still. And then these are some of the other pictures of quilts that she designed.
Lisa Woolfork 23:21
Wow, what I'm seeing is like some of the effects of modernity, like electricity being new, and these [unknown] and these huge big machines and it really feels almost like, you know, kind of some of the cutwork of Bearden a little bit.
Sarah Bond 23:36
Yes. Clearly her designs are influenced by Black artists of the time.
Lisa Woolfork 23:42
Absolutely.
Sarah Bond 23:43
Lawrence. That's what people say that they know that she was really influenced by Jacob Lawrence.
Lisa Woolfork 23:48
Yeah, absolutely.
Sarah Bond 23:49
Oh, can I just stick one thing in? So we lived in Chicago and my father's brother lived in Washington, DC. And so we would go and visit him from time to time. But Max and Ruth also lived in Washington, DC. So we would come across them from time to time. And I remember Max when I was a child, because he always wore this sort of rakish beret. He was charming. But I did come across Ruth at one of these reunions and at that point, she lived to be quite old, and she was experiencing some dementia towards the end. But at this particular reunion, I had this book and I brought it to her and I asked her about it. And she, of course -- when we start to lose our grip on the present, the past is still clear. And so she and I were able to talk a little bit about it and it was lovely.
Lisa Woolfork 24:39
What was her reaction when you showed her the quilt in the book?
Sarah Bond 24:43
She said, "Oh, I haven't thought about that for years."
Lisa Woolfork 24:46
I cannot imagine like making so much beautiful work that I'm like, Oh yeah, I forgot about that amazing quilt that ended up in one of the best quilts of you know, in 100 years.
Sarah Bond 24:56
I mean, we're in keyed in to quilt world but you know, certainly most people are not. And particularly at that time this had to be more than 20 years ago that I had this conversation with her. So, you know, quilting wasn't the same as it is now in terms of being, you know, as dominant. People were still thinking of it, and many still do as some quaint thing that a bunch of women do when they get together and isn't that cute?
Lisa Woolfork 25:19
And that's just the way that patriarchy is so dismissive. Right? If women do it, then how valuable could it be? Right? Women get to be cooks and men get to be chefs. Right? So do you imagine any lessons from your ancestors that you've been able to go back and look and find these things and to see these works of art that your family has produced? Does that guide your own creative practice in the present? You talked about, like the way that you bend the Lone Star, or the way that you can take something like the basket, which is a traditional pattern, and do something else amazing with it? Is there some way in which you want to make sure that you're leaving a great legacy behind? You know, that's not so easy that you don't have to track down. Your work has been in museums, you have been on quilt TV shows and quilt videos and speak at quilt festivals and you teach quilt classes. You have a wonderfully robust reputation, as well as this great story and presence. Have you thought about that at all, as you're kind of doing your work in the present moment?
Sarah Bond 26:22
Well, that's definitely something more recently that I have been focusing on and that I really want to tell this because, you know, I think that we in our youth are not really that interested in what the old folks have to say. I mean, my family has always stressed history and knowing where you come from and knowing who those people are. And so I've always maybe had more of a command of that sort of thing than maybe most people do. But in terms of getting down to those details, and in terms of really hearing that history, and then saying it again and saying it again, I tell this story all the time. I tell it whenever anybody is sitting down and can't get away. I tell this story all the time. I just want people to remember it. I mean, in terms of quilt practice working in a series, repetition -- because I make the same pattern of quilt again and again. But it's never the same quilt. I think that that repetition is important in storytelling, in history, in art -- all of those things because the story takes on, you know, with each new quilt that takes on a new little twist -- it takes on a new voice. And then the other thing is just talk about history. Tell your children. Ask your elders. don't wait because we're dropping like flies, you know, so don't wait, you gotta say it while you can still say it. I remember when my grandmother RosaBelle met Louvinia's daughter when she was dying from breast cancer. And I was in middle school maybe. And my father gave her a notebook and had her write some things down. And she was writing various things down not a whole lot and not necessarily terribly connected or coherent, because again, it was her last days. And so whatever was occurring to her she was writing down. And one of the things that she wrote down was, "my father told me that they were never slaves. His parents were a love match." And I didn't know what that meant, right? And she also wrote down Rufus Kleckly. So I started to get on Ancestry and go back and go back and then I found Louvinia and Louvinia was married to Esmond Kleckly. And I knew Esmond was a family name because my father's brother was named Esmond. So I was like, well, this is definitely us. And so then I'm going back a little bit farther. And then I see that Esmond's father is Rufus Kleckly. Now Rufus Kleckly was a Scottish-Irish man who emigrated here from Aberdeen. And he took up with a woman of color named Julia. It's not clear whether she was, you know, 100% African, or maybe she was African with some Indigenous American, but he took up with Julia and had a number of children -- four or five children. And so I'm going back through the records and I'm going back and I look at the census records from 1860. I could find Rufus Kleckly. Rufus Kleckly was single, and there was nothing about any children. So then I kept looking and I found the property schedule -- the slave schedule. So among Rufus Kleckly's property was a black woman, 26 years old, an eight year old, mulatto girl, and a two year old, mulatto boy, so I was like, wow. Then I go to 1870. There's Rufus Kleckly again -- Julia has died by this time, but there's Rufus Kleckly and instead of that two year old piece of property, there's a 12 year old boy who has his son, right, written as his son, living with Rufus Kleckly and there's an 18 year old girl, who is his daughter. And in the census, it says that Esmond is his son, and he is in school and I can't remember his sister's name off the top of my head, but she is keeping house for him. So here's this man, who, in 1860, owned these people because that's the only way that the census could understand them. But in 1870, if they had been his property, now these are his children. They're listed as his children. And she was right, by God. RosaBelle was right, she wrote that down, it was just a couple of sentences. But dammit, she was right.
Lisa Woolfork 30:41
And I think that that tells an important story, right? Because in 1860, it wouldn't have been even legal for them to say they were married. And actually a lot of Black folks would have to buy -- at least in Virginia -- you had to buy your relatives, and Virginia also had a limit where you had to move out of the state within a year, or everybody was re-enslaved. So it looks on paper, like this person owns enslaved people, when in fact, it's really their family members.
Sarah Bond 31:12
Right. At that time, you know, because of the age of those children, it worked out, because he could protect them when they were his property. And then when they got older, they were his children. But yeah, who knows how it would have worked out if it had been 10 years before or whatever. But anyway, I was just amazed that -- ask the elders because even if they just write down a little bit of something, you never know what you're going to be able to find out from that little bit of something.
Lisa Woolfork 31:39
You never know. And that little bit of something is really a seed. And in your case, it just blossomed into this absolutely beautiful story that you are all participating in. You're observing it, and you are participating in it, and you are promoting it. And that is why you are the star of the Atlanta Quilt Show coming up as their master quilter, who is going to be teaching people all sorts of amazing things. So what's coming out for you with the show? Like what are you gonna be doing?
Sarah Bond 32:14
I'm going to teach a class two times, and there is an existing show, if you go to Facebook, or to the website for the Atlanta Quilt Show. There's a show, I think it might already be up. But it'll be up during that time. And the Atlanta Quilt Show is particularly focused on African American quilts, and traditions and history and all of that. So it is for us, by us.
Lisa Woolfork 32:40
It's amazing. And I am so glad that we got a chance to talk today. I mean, really, I feel like we need a part two, because there's so much that we didn't talk about. But I am so glad that you are going to be having this show. And that you're going to be doing your amazing lesson, hopefully proselytizing the good news about paper piecing. I really appreciate having such a strong ally in the paper piecing wars. I absolutely do.
Sarah Bond 33:08
I love it. And you know, it's funny, I never would have thought that it would be something to appeal to me. But it does, because it's just a tool. It's just a way to get to that sexy, sharp point. You bend it, make it work for you, you don't have to bend for it.
Lisa Woolfork 33:23
I agree. Y'all, we have been talking with Sarah Bond, and I can tell you that my heart feels full. And I really hope that we're able to walk away with some wonderful lessons that she has shared with us today. And look out for her stuff. I'm gonna see if we can release this episode closer to the time that the Atlanta Quilt Show is gonna be on so that folks can come and see you. But I'm going to include links to all your stuff. I'll put links to the books. I'll put links to your exhibit. Absolutely. And congratulations on that. Really, it is incredibly exciting. And I am so glad for it. And I'm so grateful to you and for you for what you are doing and modeling for us in the ancestral practice of quilting.
Sarah Bond 34:08
Like I said, I'm not shutting up, I'm gonna keep telling it. So you might have an opportunity to hear it again.
Lisa Woolfork 34:13
Thank you so much, Sarah and we'll be sure to see you and follow you on all the social media and in Atlanta.
Sarah Bond 34:19
Thank you so much and I have been so thrilled to be here with you, Lisa. Thank you.
Lisa Woolfork 34:36
You've been listening to the Stitch Please Podcast, the official podcast of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black lives matter. We appreciate you supporting us by listening to the podcast. If you'd like to reach out to us with questions, you can contact us at blackwomenstitch@gmail.com. If you'd like to support us financially, you can do that by supporting us on Patreon. p a t r e o n. And you can find Black Women Stitch there in the Patreon directory. And for as little as $2 a month, you can help support the project with things like editing, transcripts, and other things to strengthen the podcast. And finally, if financial support is not something you can do right now, you can really, really help the podcast by rating it and reviewing it anywhere you listen to podcasts that allows you to review them. So I know that not all podcast directories or services allow for reviews. But for those who do, for those that have like a star rating, or just ask for a few comments, if you could share those comments and say nice things about us and the Stitch Please Podcast, that is incredibly helpful. Thank you so much. Come back next week and we'll help you get your stitch together.