Take an audio tour of "Quilted Connections: Sisterhood in Cloth," an exhibition at The Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum and the oldest museum building in the United States! Listen to master quilters Rosalind Robinson, Sandra Smith, and Glenda Richardson talk about their quilting techniques and the fascinating stories that surround their craft. Includes 17 stops with the artists. The exhibition was on view at The Peale from December 1, 2022-January 29, 2023.

Sandra Smith (00:00): A third quilt that I have in the show is called "The River." And "The River" is a quilt that is made so that it is hanging perpendicular. But when I made it, I had intended for it to go horizontal. But I was with a group of people who were, and we were critiquing each other's work and trying to figure out the best way to quilt those pieces once they were pieced.

(00:27): And they said, "You know what Sandra, if you hang it perpendicular, it looks a lot different." And it looks like a river with side sand or whatever on the sides. So I named it the river. And what's particular about that quilt is it's made from an Indonesian sarong, and the sarong is, was just too beautiful to cut and to make into little tiny pieces. So I wanted to keep it in chunks that were able to keep the integrity of the design of the fabric.

(01:08): And so what I did is I chunked it, if you will, technical term, and I added African fabrics and other boutique fabrics around my chunks in order to keep my design. And when I went to quilt that one, if you look at that one carefully when you go to the show, the sarong has parallel lines of fabric. It's woven so that you can see these parallel lines.

(01:41): And I had intended to quilt up and down these parallel lines. Well, as I started quilting, it got all bunched up and icky, another technical term. So I decided to do a zigzag pattern of stitching in between these parallel lines. And that was way cool. I liked the impact of that. So that's the story of "The River" quilt.