January 2025 Update

Dear All, Happy New Year! May I take this opportunity to wish you all the best for 2025. After the preparations of 2024, this is the year that work on America’s Tapestry truly begins. How exciting! What’s New Following our November Zoom conference with David Brashear, director of the Muscarelle Museum of Art, we travelled to Williamsburg, VA in December to meet in person and assess the exhibition space. It’s absolutely stunning. The selected gallery is one of the largest in the newly renovated museum, benefitting from bespoke lighting, high ceilings, and a flood of natural light. Your work is going to look fantastic! This month, I’m thrilled to announce two exciting sponsorships to support our work. Many of you will recognize these esteemed needlework distributors from your own practice! Wichelt Imports has agreed to supply all of our embroidery floss needs, and Yarn Tree will provide our beautiful 32 count Belfast Linen. We could not be more grateful for the generosity of these sponsors, and America’s Tapestry will benefit tremendously from these quality materials. Over the Christmas break, we have been hard at work creating a digital home for the Tapestry. The site is truly comprehensive and will continue to expand as we get underway. You can see it here: https://americastapestry.com You can help! One of the objectives of America’s Tapstery is to reignite passion for embroidery arts in the United States, and to showcase the beautiful work that is already being done in our many Chapters. Our website is an opportunity to do that. On our website, we have created a space for each of your Chapters. You can see them here. We have done our best to make sure everything is accurate but please check your entry on the page and let us know if there are any alterations to make. Please send us a short biography of your Chapter and an image that exemplifies the quality of your work. We can add these to the website! We have also created social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. These will boost awareness of your work and our project. To help get them off the ground, we invite you now to join the Facebook and Instagram groups and follow our Twitter account. Either post pictures and notes about your work on your tapestry, or send them to us to post, and we will share the story of its development on these sites! Lastly, we have developed the ability for people to sign up for this newsletter through our website. It would help us grow our community if you could invite your familty and friends to sign up, by forwarding them a link to our contact page: https://americastapestry.com/contact. What’s Next? Hold on to your hats: stitching commences this month in three of our states! Georgia at the Atlanta History Center, New Jersey at Saint Paul’s Luthern Church in Hainesport, & New York at the Van Shaick Mansion in Albany. Details are being finalised, then all the materials - including the linen with the design pre-drawn, embroidery floss, and embroidery frame will be sent directly to each State Director. Recruitment has begun for illustrators to design the 10 remaining state panel designs. This will ensure that there is creative diversity in how each state is represented, and provides a platform for up and coming artists to feature their work on the national stage. Attention - Stitchers Needed! That’s right - we are still seeking talented stitchers from the following states. Think you know the right person or organization? Send them our info and invite them to join! Rhode Island North Carolina South Carolina That's all for this month. Thanks for reading, and happy stitching! Best wishes, Stefan