BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) — What makes up the fabric of a community?
At Stitch Buffalo, it’s not a shared background, country or even language that sews community together. The people — more specifically, women from all around the world — make up the community at this Buffalo nonprofit.
Dawn Hoeg founded Stitch Buffalo a decade ago.
“I was spending a lot of time on the West Side in 2014 and running my errands seeing all the different cultures on the street — women waiting at bus stops wearing their traditional clothing,” Hoeg said. “And with my studies in textile history and textile arts and different cultures, and being a maker of textiles myself and teaching it, I thought, wow, there’s a real shared knowledge here that I could probably pull together in the means of a community workshop for women with the textile arts being the foundations. Not necessarily the language, not religion, not political … it was really about a creative foundation in textiles.”
The workshops started out as a weekly way to bring refugee and immigrant women together to learn embroidery. From there, it grew into the textile arts center it is today.