by Joanna Dermenjian | Sep 21, 2023 | History
Quilts tell stories. Quilt tell stories about who made them. The designs, the colours, the materials used, the patterns in the fabric, the quality of the construction and stitching, all tell us something about the person or group who made it. Quilts from wartime also...
by Joanna Dermenjian | Sep 3, 2023 | Article, History, Red Cross
I am often asked what we know about how Canadian women went about completing the work of producing over 50,000,000 items for the war effort during WWII. Where did they meet, how did they organize, who was in charge, did they work on an assembly line, did they work to...
by Joanna Dermenjian | Aug 30, 2023 | Article, History, Research
This week, after finding the 1941 image of an underground hospital in London in wartime (posted on my IG account), I decided to look for more references to quilts in British newspapers. I found the article above in the Western News in Cardiff, Wales, dated August...
by Joanna Dermenjian | Jun 27, 2023 | Article, History, Research
One of my interests in considering Canadian women’s wartime charitable work in textiles, is the multigenerational practice of women sewing and knitting in wartime. In a recent display I did for Quilts Kingston 2023, I demonstrated briefly how three women in Kingston...
by Joanna Dermenjian | May 21, 2023 | History, Research
Last month when I made a presentation at the Museum of Lennox and Addington in Napanee, Ontario, I was asked how I became interested in this research about the quilt-making and other handwork by Canadian women during the Second World War. One of the reasons, I...
by Joanna Dermenjian | Mar 4, 2023 | Article, History, Research
Republished from THE CONVERSATION, February 2023 – Dr. Irene Gammel and Joanna Dermenjian In 1992, in Esher Library southwest of London, England, Josephine Andrews and her mother, Christine, collected blankets to donate to Kurdish refugees of the Gulf War. Among...
