This past December I was commissioned to make a traditional Pennsylvania Dutch textile to celebrate the birth of a child — an heirloom to hang in the nursery. I decided on an ausgenaeht handduch ‘decorated towel'.

This week I’m starting on my Perkiomen Valley quilt pattern. As I started cutting out the necessary squares and triangles, I was reminded of a strange news report about a quilting party that happened this month 157 years ago.

The Great Depression, 1929–1939, weighed heavily on rural communities in the U.S., and so President Franklin Roosevelt proposed relief, recovery, and reform through a variety of New Deal agencies. One of those agencies — the Farm Security Administration (FSA) — provided relief to rural farmers.

As 2025 winds down, I’m thinking ahead to some craft challenges that I’d like to do in the new year. A few months ago, I finally bought a good sewing machine — nothing professional or super fancy.

Bringing light into the darkness is a common ritual during the bleakest nights of wintertime. The Christmas Eve lovefeast in Moravian churches continues on this tradition.

Young Jacob Gerhard found a secluded spot halfway up a mountain to build a small log cabin.

Yost Yoder died in 1742 and was sorely missed from the old homestead along the Manatawny Creek.

Jerusalem Eastern Salisbury’s church records, kept in immaculate German script, suddenly end in 1791.

In the years after the Revolutionary War, fear gripped tightly around the small Salzbarrick (Salisbury) area nestled on the slope of Lehigh Mountain.

I remember well my mother and grandmother descending below the roadway to pick from the dense thicket of watercress.

Making lace can be extremely time-consuming.

The Pennsylvania Dutch loved to add decorations all over.

There have been far too many heated debates about the purpose of decoration among the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Early on, Pennsylvania Dutch families documented loved ones with fraktur, especially birth- and baptismal certificates, that were often tucked away in drawers and chests, or perhaps folded and safeguarded in the family bible.

I remember it all so vividly, even over three decades later. I was sitting with my grandmother being let in on a family secret — it was, what seemed to me at the time, a secret language.

This week on my loom are some placemats in a pattern that I’ve called “Meadow Valley.”

This past March, I returned to Marburg, Germany where I did most of my undergraduate college studies.

This week’s post touches on two of my passions: collecting material culture and making material culture.

Although we tend to identify Pennsylvania Dutch artists as practicing a distinctive folk art style, artists of Pennsylvania Dutch stock run the entire gamut of the art world.

On a bitterly cold day in February 1784, General Peter Muhlenberg, enroute to Ohio, stayed at the Kucher homestead near present-day Lebanon, Pennsylvania.