The Quilt Alliance's Running Stitch podcast is back for its third season and features quiltmakers such as Eliza Hardy Jones, whose quilts interpret folk songs through color and pattern, Zak Foster, a high school teacher turned full-time quiltmaker, and Sarah Steiner, who taught herself to quilt during the COVID-19 pandemic. Watch the trailer for the new season now and new episodes will be released weekly.

From the Quilt Alliance:

"The nonprofit Quilt Alliance launches its third season of Running Stitch, A QSOS Podcast, hosted by Janneken Smucker, Professor of History at West Chester University. The podcast explores quilt stories, revealing the inner thoughts, feelings, and motivations of contemporary quiltmakers by drawing from Quilters S.O.S. -- Save Our Stories (QSOS), the long-running grassroots history project created by the Quilt Alliance in 1999.

This third season of Running Stitch focuses on younger quiltmakers--most in their 30’s or early 40’s--who are re-interpreting quiltmaking traditions and incorporating contemporary influences to make something that’s uniquely theirs. Running Stitch host Janneken Smucker selects interview clips from QSOS interviews with quilters of all kinds, recorded over the past two decades, and discusses them with each podcast guest. This season features quiltmakers such as Eliza Hardy Jones, whose quilts interpret folk songs through color and pattern, Zak Foster, a high school teacher turned full-time quiltmaker, and Sarah Steiner, who taught herself to quilt during the COVID-19 pandemic. A trailer for the season is available now and new episodes will be released weekly.

The QSOS collection includes over 1,200 interviews conducted from 1999 to 2017. The interviews are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and also at the Louie B. Nunn Center for History at the University of Kentucky Libraries. The Nunn Center digitized interviews recorded on cassette tape that will allow users to listen to these recordings as they are added to the new QSOS website at www.QSOS.QuiltAlliance.org, and makes the QSOS excerpts in the podcast possible.

As the first two seasons of Running Stitch illustrate, quilts and quiltmaking are useful lenses to examine some of today’s most pressing issues: activism, public health, politics, race, and the economy. Past guests have included quilt makers and scholars, including Victoria Findlay Wolfe, Carolyn Mazloomi, Thomas Knauer, Melanie Testa, Jinny Beyer, panelists Meg Cox, Frances O'Roark Dowell, Chawne Kimber and Gwen Westerman in Season One, and Ricky Tims, Merikay Waldvogel, Linda Pumphrey, Denyse Schmidt, Barbara Brackman and Joe Cunningham in Season Two.

Click Here to visit the Running Stitch page to listen to all previous episodes.

Subscribe at: Apple Podcasts – Spotify – Google Podcasts – Stitcher

Also available on Quilt Alliance website.

Watch the trailer below to get a taste of what's to come this season.