From Amy Milne, Executive Director of the Quilt Alliance: "In this issue we are honored to present a guest essay from Karen S. Musgrave, a past volunteer and QA board member, who played a pivotal role in the development of the QSOS oral history project. Karen is an interdisciplinary, multihyphenate artist whose recent body of work deals with loss, memory, and identity. She feels passionately about connecting cultures with quilts. Karen's memories from her work with QSOS paints a vivid picture of what volunteer work can offer an artist, especially giving back to and gaining from a passion project."

From "We Are Our Stories" by Karen S. Musgrave:

"We are our stories and this one is mine. How do I reach you and make you care about the stories behind quilts? By you I mean the public, researchers, academia, people I wanted to interview, workshop attendees, lecture attendees, readers of the articles I wrote and the manual that I edited for Quilters’ S.O.S. – Save Our Stories and the Alliance—so everyone. Even now after being away from interviewing for years, I want you to care. Though we have come a long way, women and quilts still face inequality. We can learn a lot about a quilt by looking at it, but that does not tell us the whole story. Listening to the quiltmaker does."

Click Here, or the image below, to read the rest of the essay.