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.

This recipe comes from Gram’s family who lived down near Center Valley in Lehigh County.

Just off my loom are table runners that I wove in a goose eye twill variant. The pattern is based on a diamond patterned tablecloth owned by the Keim family who lived in Berks County’s Oley Valley.