Tapestry Volume II
Shana Goggins & Angie Weaver
When we began this work, we often thought about quilts.
Not just the ones folded at the foot of a bed or hung on a wall, but the ones still being made—in living rooms and church basements, at kitchen tables and community centers across Kentucky. We thought about the women who gather to piece them together, whose hands know the rhythm of needle and thread, whose conversations weave in and out like the patterns they’re creating.
Quilting and tapestry-making hold deep cultural significance—especially for Black, Brown, and Appalachian women—as ways of preserving stories, making beauty from scraps, and building community through shared work. In the quilting circles of the rural South, in the textile traditions carried across oceans and mountains, in the intentional gathering of women who know that what they’re stitching together is bigger than fabric—there is a practice of honoring what came before while creating something new.
This is what Tapestry Volume II aims to do. In our first volume, we gathered stories from women across Kentucky whose lives and leadership were shaping their communities in ways both visible and quiet. We wanted to honor the fullness of their journeys—the rural and the urban, the rooted and the transplanted, the inherited and the imagined.
For this second volume, we wanted to expand the tapestry. We asked contributors from Volume I: Who else should be in this conversation? Whose wisdom are we missing? Who do you see doing work that matters? We listened. We added names of our own—women whose work we’ve witnessed, whose leadership we’ve admired from a distance, whose stories we knew needed to be part of this collection.
Read more in Becoming Part of the Tapestry: A Woman’s Guide for Social Justice Edition II below!
—Shana Goggins & Angie Weaver
Contact the team at Tapestryky@gmail.com.
The Kentucky Intercultural Microgrant Program is a seed grant to support two or more individuals or organizations collaborating across distance, difference, or sector on projects that celebrate and connect Kentucky's people and places. Our 2025 funding partners included Kentucky Arts Council, Fund for the Arts, Kentucky Foundation for Women, Kentucky Waterways Alliance, EarthTools, and individual donors. Learn more at kyrux.org/microgrants