Ames residents came together as a community to mend a quilt of a local artist.

Catherine Reinhart, creator and lead artist for Collective Mending Sessions and a studio artist living and creating in Ames, leads the Collective Mending Sessions, a series of socially engaged workshops centered on collectively mending a discarded quilt.

Wednesday’s session took place at Reliable Street, which is a nonprofit arts organization located in Ames seeking to engage the community through the arts. Located inside a grain elevator, Reliable Street houses Lockwood Cafe and a gallery.

The event featured a table covered with a singular quilt of a variety of colors, mainly red and blue, situated in a room off the main area of the Lockwood Cafe. Around it, attendees gathered, stitching different patterns into the colorful quilt while conversing with one another, building community.

Reinhart said the blue, underlying colors of the quilt that the community works on is actually the original quilt, while the red part is something more special.

“The red parts are pieces I cut out from an older project,” Reinhart said. “It was my thesis project, and I cut the project up. […] My thesis was a large-scale textile installation that was site-specific, and it was never again going to be shown, so I had all this yardage that I made.”

But before the red parts of the current quilt were added, Reinhart started with a regular quilt.

“This project started with a quilt that was mine when I was a teenager,” Reinhart said. “I used and abused it and told my mother to throw it away when I went off to college at Iowa State. She did not because she is a wiser woman than me, and about two years ago, she gave it back to me.”

After gaining the quilt back, Reinhart said she started to stitch on it, and she wanted to repair it.

“It was in shreds, it was in tatters, and I knew I needed to mend it, to repair it and that that was important work,” Reinhart said. “I started to do that alone in my studio, and I found that I just couldn’t. It was a heavy art object, emotionally heavy.”

From there, she decided she needed to do this work with other people; this is when she created “Collective Mending Sessions.”

“I am a fiber artist. I have all these hand skills; I know how to stitch, I’m teaching myself how to mend,” Reinhart said. “I can teach people how to do that, and we can work on it together and sort of build community together through the stitching and just through good conversations of metaphors of mending and just working together, building community through a shared task.”

Reinhart received a grant from the Iowa Arts Council to do this project. The council pays for supplies, marketing materials and one session per month for the series. She said she has been doing this series for around a year now, with one a month.

“The session this month is supported through the #WomenKnowStuffToo series,” Reinhart said. “So this month, it is in conjunction with the series and Women’s History Month, and the month of March in the textile world is ‘Mend March,’ so it’s not only celebrating women’s handwork and the history of women making art but people all around the world are also focusing on repairing textiles.”

Additional dates, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., are March 11, 18 and 25 at Reliable Street. Sessions last two to three hours, and all skill levels invited. All workshops are free and open to the public. Registration is encouraged.

This program is part of a series anchored by the reACT art exhibition titled #WomenKnowStuffToo, which is open from March 2 through April 3 in the Reiman Gallery of the Christian Petersen Art Museum in Morrill Hall. The purpose is to engage community members in an ongoing conversation celebrating women artists and makers, as well as their impact on the arts and expertise in the field.