East Falmouth resident Lyra Maclone has been making Christmas gifts for about four years. She likes to do a wide variety of crafts and finds many ideas and patterns on the Internet. They’ll ask for it every year,” she says. Like Maclone, Swansea resident Stephanie Stroud has been making gifts for years and encourages her four sons, who range in age from 12 to 20, to do the same because she thinks such gifts are more personal. But she also has some nice suggestions for those who don’t know how to knit. Just have a fancy bottle present at the occasion and seal it with wax and put a tag on it identifying the occasion and the date.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Donna Kooler, who is the owner and driving force behind Kooler Design Studio, a multimedia publishing and designing company who specialise in just about anything to do with handcraft. After art school I became an art director for an advertising agency, I married and stayed at home to raise a family before returning to work as Design Director for Sunset Designs, a needlework manufacturer. When Sunset moved out of California, I asked my design staff to join me in starting Kooler Design Studio, and the rest is history. The charts, kits, books, computer programs and finished products sold on our web site are all designed and/or produced by Kooler Design. Our Encyclopedia of Quilting, edited and written by Laura Nownes a well respected quilter and author, is a comprehensive view of quilting which includes the history of quilting, basics and patterns for beginners and expert alike.

Exhibition curator Jill D’Alessandro of FAMSF explains, “Although Amish women first learned quiltmaking from their ‘English’ [non-Amish] neighbors, they quickly developed a unique sensibility of their own, coupling distinctive choices of quilt patterns and fabrics with unusual spatial arrangements. They were made to be both aesthetically pleasing and utilitarian and, yet, still had to adhere to the code of the Ordung , an oral tradition of religious rules governing Amish social customs and moral life. A decade or more of feminism now permits us to acknowledge what was previously devalued as “women’s work” for the Amish adhere to rigid gender roles and the quilts are always made by women. Amish, the art of the quilt / text, Robert Hughes ; plate commentary, Julie Silber.

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