Community Quiltmaking Center Opening at ReUse

It started with a passion for sustainability, quilting, and a barn’s worth of fabric. Peggy Dunlop always had a passion for the community and quilting and has found many ways to share both during her time in Tompkins County.

Peggy graduated from Cornell’s College of Home Economics in the 1950s. Peggy taught sewing for two years in California before moving back to Ithaca to obtain her master’s degree. This time, she met her husband, Dave. Both were very active in Brooktondale, where they lived until they moved into Kendal at Ithaca just a few years ago, due to Dave’s declining health. The two were together for over 60 years until Dave’s passing last year. 

“Rather than going back to my teaching job in California, when my husband and I became engaged, my maternal grandmother, who had lived with our family for the last 16 years of her life, gave me a quilt that her grandmother had made and it’s quite an extraordinary quilt. That sort of sparked my interest in quilts,” Peggy said. “Two years after we were married I formed a group of women to make a quilt to raffle for our benefit at our community center and that was in 1974. It has become an annual tradition of producing a quilt to raffle.”

Peggy said the quilt raffle is now the largest fundraiser at the Apple Festival and is important for the community center’s funding. 

Because of her background in textiles and clothing, Peggy did most of the shopping for the quilts’ various fabrics, which is how she started slowly growing her collection. 

“I found that I had to go around to so many different stores trying to find the right color or the right pattern that I began accumulating fabrics to make it easier to play around with our quilt. One thing led to another and I accumulated a lot of fabrics,” Peggy said. “We put an annex on our house so I had this space to store them. It was essentially a two car garage that I converted into what I called my quilter.” 

It was the move to Kendal that made Peggy realize she would have nowhere to keep the collection of fabric she had accumulated over the years. Because her and Dave’s move was in the midst of the pandemic, there were few options for them to store the collection. Thankfully, the Ithaca ReUse Center was willing to hold the fabric for Peggy. 

This idea to hold the fabric stores came as part of a project Peggy had always wanted to start that would share sewing and quilting with the broader community, not just her Brooktondale Community Center. ReUse is known for their dedication to sustainability and community education, especially with the Fixers station located at the MegaCenter in the Triphammer Mall. Part of the Quiltmaking Center’s goal is to teach people how to recycle their clothing, even in its unsellable or unwearable phase. 

“The Community Quiltmaking Center is very dedicated to ReUse’s mission and values and will be helping to repurpose clothing that is unsellable at ReUse,” Hubberman said. “We’re sharing the commitment to recycling clothing for sewing or quilting and that’s really bringing us back to what quilting really was and is, giving life and joy to something.”

Diane Cohen, the executive director of Finger Lakes ReUse, and Peggy agreed they wanted to create this community quilting space, but due to the pandemic it would have to wait. 

However, the wait is over. On Sunday, April 23, the Community Quiltmaking Center will officially open inside the ReUse MegaCenter. A celebration will be held from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. with remarks from Peggy at 2 p.m. Everyone in the community is welcome and encouraged to attend to learn what Peggy and this center are all about. 

During the event, aspiring quiltmakers can sign up for free beginning classes and workshops complete with fabric, times for open sewing and quiltmaking, learning to sew, sewing machine how-tos, and quiltmaking demos, and even be matched with a quiltmaking mentor. Community members can also learn more about fabric grants for community quiltmaking, and sign up to share a skill, and get involved. 

Peggy emphasized that this is not a shop despite being located in the ReUse Center. It is a community resource that is free to everyone in the community. 

“I’m 85 years old now so this has become too big an undertaking for me at this stage in my life and to have it picked up by this amazing group with the ability to bring people together is wonderful,” Peggy said. “Diane Cohen’s offer of Finger Lakes reuse being a potential partner in this has just enabled it to become a reality that I wouldn’t have been able to bring about at this point in my life. It’s wonderful to see my long held vision become a reality.”

If you are interested in learning sewing, sewing machine, or quiltmaking skills to make a quilt, or would like to mentor or teach skills to an aspiring quiltmaker, email Brigid Hubberman Create@CommunityQuiltingCenter.org