Quilt Me A Story

Reviewed By: Lacy Stahl (Bedell)

REVIEW

Quilt Me A Story Review by Lacy Stahl (Bedell) http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~kvander/books/MEESKE.pdf Quilt Me A Story is a site that discusses how our ancestors used quilts to tell stories and how we can teach kids to use quilts to tell stories. In the site, there are different discussion of how quilting came to be, who influenced the patterns, and last, how to tie in quilting to modern-day storytelling by creating a story web. This site is linked to Rutgers University's Professor Kay Vandergriff’s site. Prof. Vandergriff’s site is made up of special interest pages, designed for those interested in young adult and children’s literature. This site is located at: http://scils.rutgers.edu/%7Ekvander/ Professor Vandergriff is a professor of communication, information, and library science at Rutgers. Although it is not stated, one can deduce that Susan Meeske, creator of Quilt Me A Story, must have been one of her students. This site was last updated in July of 2001, which makes it recent, but not entirely up-to-date. However, since there are no statistics or other ever-changing information, the site is fine. While the site has not been changed in more than a year, because its ideas are of the academic realm, one must take that with a grain of salt, and look at what it is that the site proposes. The information in the site is still current by today’s standards. There is no email address or way to contact the author/creator of the web site. After conducting some research and discovering the connection to Prof. Vandergriff at Rutgers, one might start there with questions. However, one probably would want to contact the creator directly and that is not possible via the web site itself. The creator of this web site does a tremendous job of citing resources. Her bibliography alone is worth reading, if you need some great stories about quilting. Resources are cited in the work as well as at the end of the piece. This site is an excellent way to acquaint yourself with the history of quilting as well as how quilting can be used in your classroom today. This site also explains the importance of storytelling within the quilting community.