Washington library will host ‘collective mending’ sessions

WASHINGTON — The Washington Public Library will host “Collective Mending Sessions” for a quilt as part of Fiber Arts February on Friday, Feb. 3 from 6-9 p.m. and Saturday, Feb. 4 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The workshops are facilitated by Catherine Reinhart, an Ames artist specializing in reused materials with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in integrated studio arts, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in textiles.

The project brings community members together to fix an abandoned quilt, a process Reinhart said bridged gaps within a community.

“The people that come to the sessions, they can come from a variety of backgrounds, skills, beliefs, education levels,” she said. “You cultivate the kind of relationships that break down those barriers … there are a lot of lessons that we learn from making things with our hands that are maybe hard to explain.”

The sessions are also symbolically tied to community mending. Reinhart said the act of bringing participants together for a shared goal, larger than themselves, was symbolically powerful.

"We take lessons from mending and repair, and translate those into mending of different kinds,“ she said. ”Within our relationships, within our own person, and then within our communities.“

The fact that each quilt takes several sessions to mend is another aspect of the metaphor, according to Reinhart.

“You can’t build community through a one-off thing,” she said. “You’ve got to keep showing up, you’ve got to keep meeting people, you’ve got to establish relationships, you’ve got to fight about stuff a little bit, got to listen to each other.”

Reinhart said it was a “socially engaged workshop,” that was part sewing bee, part group discussion.

The target audience is broad: anyone interested in textile repair.

“I do have men who come and work on the quilt, but definitely the majority of participants are women,” Reinhart said. “But it’s a good mix of young people who are interested in repair or interested in quilting but maybe don’t have the skills … and then women in their 60s, 70s, who really do have a lot of those skills. So it’s really intergenerational, which is exciting.”

Participants are not required to RSVP, and don’t necessarily need textile repair skills going in. The artist said she could accommodate for any experience level.

“I tailor every workshop to whoever shows up,” she said. “If I have a lot of beginners, I do more instruction … if I do it with quilt guilds, these women have been sewing for longer than I’ve been alive. I don’t need to teach them how to fix things, they probably can do it better than me.”

The idea began in 2018 with one out-of-shape quilt from Reinhart’s own childhood, but is now on its eighth repair job, and around its 50th session. The item returned to her life after college, inspiring the now yearslong, international endeavor.

As an artist whose medium is reused objects, Reinhart said the object was an instant inspiration. But with heavy damage, a huge size and difficult work required, the project proved overwhelming and isolating from her own studio.

“I quickly said, ‘OK, I want to do this with other people, what would that look like?’” Reinhart said. “Before then, I really hadn’t done any community projects with facilitating groups, that wasn’t my thing, I would just make art in my studio by myself … but I really felt called that this was the thing I was supposed to work on.”

The quilts now come from secondhand stores, as well as donations from past participants.

"I’ll just get boxes of random quilts on my doorstep,“ she said. ”They all just make their way to me.“

Reinhart’s trip to the Washington Library for Fiber Arts February comes a year after her talk on the sessions in 2022, which did not include a workshop. This year, library staff said they had secured funding for the activity with support from the Iowa Arts Council.

The artist said libraries were well-suited for the workshops. After teaching herself much of the craft through books and videos, she brings a number of those resources along with her to the sessions. Doing so adds an educational impact to the program.

“Instead of me instructing them for 20 minutes, I can point them to a book where they can get some agency and learn where to find that information themselves,” Reinhart said. “I’m really excited to work with another library, because books and resources that help people learn independently is also one facet of it as well.”

LeAnn Kunz, who helped organize the workshop, said she was excited about the opportunity.

“I expect everyone will learn some practical, as well as artistic mending skills, and leave fully enriched by the joint effort,” she said.

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com