Patching Together Appalachian, Slovak Quilters
They live continents apart and have never
met one another. Yet a group of West Virginia crafters have begun to stitch together a
friendship with some sister crafters who belong to the new Slovakia Women's Needlework
Cooperative.
The connecting thread was carried from Malden
to Slovakia last fall and sewed in place by Jamie Thiebeault, manager of the Cabin Creek
Quilts cooperative near Charleston, W. Va. The idea of forging links between quilters
half-a-world away from each other occurred on a mission he took for ACDI/VOCA, the
development arm of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives in Washington, D.C. He'll
return to Slovakia for another two-month stint at the end of June.
Essentially, he was conducting a marketing
study in a village area in eastern Slovakia, a former wine and sugarcane growing area near
the borders with Ukraine and Hungary that was used mostly for munitions manufacturing
during the Russian occupation.
Using a translator to help with the language
differences, Thiebeault was invited to view an exhibit of craft articles made mostly by
local women. "They displayed some excellent samples of needlework, embroidery, some
wood carvings and paintings," he says. I offered tips on marketing their crafts and
developing a business that would attract tourists looking for souvenirs that represented
the Slovak culture. We're doing much the same right now in West Virginia. My plan was to
jump-start their budding operation with some of our techniques.
'As a cross-cultural gesture on behalf of Cabin
Creek, I placed an order for 50 traditional hand-embroidered needlework squares with the
new 10-member cooperative," Thiebeault adds. We'll incorporate them into some of our
crafts such as quilts, pillow cases and bibs. If the test marketing works, we'll take them
to craft shows in New York and Atlanta to measure the popularity for further marketing and
development.
Thiebeault had some previous experience at this
type of marketing when he worked on a project with the Hmong (a Southeast Asian people) as
an exhibit. Although the Slovak cooperative is small, there is a tremendous opportunity to
expand it and create many others. "We'd like to become the finishers and designers
for a multi-cultural craft market," he says. "In doing so, we'd be taking a page
from operations manual of the U. S. automobile industry. This is part of our survival
strategy. I envision these crafts could be used as a cultural lesson for kids.
"We want to pull out that American
ingenuity so our members can keep sewing in their homes and face the challenges of global
competition," he adds. "We need to think about what is unique and genuine in our
culture that can't be copied." 
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