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Saturday, November 8, 2025

Sewing In The Fog with Radha Weaver

I want to pause briefly to say how much I love my quilt guild, which is the Minneapolis Modern Quilt Guild. I work remotely in Minneapolis, and I met a coworker (on purpose) at QuiltCon, the modern quilting's annual meeting, and wow wow wow, I fell in love with modern quilting, hook, line, and sinker. It was a crash bing bang all consuming love at first sight, and I joined her local guild, which had switched to an on line format during the pandemic, and now I really cannot get enough of the lectures we hear every month from modern quilters who talk about who they are, where they came from, and what they are doing. Our October speaker was Radha Weaver, who grew up on a commune in the Bay Area, and then after college worked in the garment industry for 15 years. She traveled to places where fabric is produced, like China and Bangladesh, and saw first hand both the process of fabric production and the conditions that the workers experienced and decided it was time for her to bow out of that work. She pivoted to recycling, or what is popularly known as upcycling, fabric. She works primarily in denim, some with leather, and now she not only uses previously used fabric in her work but she helps people connect with each other to exchange or off load fabric they have purchased but no longer want. She is adamantly not opposed to buying or selling fabric--she does want to get away from the fast fashion idea, where you buy something and wear it once or twice, but do not wear it out. That is unsustainable, and she is offering ideas about what to do instead.

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