Tutwiler Quilters Selling More Than Quilts at Oxford Fiber Arts Festival

By Alyssa Schnugg

News editor

alyssa.schnugg@hottytoddy.com

The Tutwiler Quilters will have hundreds of hand-quilted items for sale at the annual Oxford Fiber Arts Festival at the Powerhouse this weekend.

Quilted items for sale include bed quilts in twin, full, queen and king sizes, placemats in singles as well as sets, table runners, hot pads, bags, hot mitts, cell phone and tablet holders and lanyards.

The Festival will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday at the Powerhouse.

The Tutwiler Quilters are a group of African-American women associated with the Tutwiler Community Education Center.

Click here for more information about the Oxford Fiber Arts Festival.

According to its website, the Tutwiler Quilters started in 1988 as a project of the Tutwiler Clinic Outreach Program. The program helps African American women in the Mississippi Delta area use their skills of quilt making to help support themselves and their families, as well as to preserve a quilting style that is indigenous to the African American people in the Delta area.

The quilters work at their homes, creating works of art that have been featured around the state and on national television.

Mary Willis-Mackey said there are currently about eight quilters in the group who work hard at filling orders done on the Tutwiler Center website, as well as providing stock to sell throughout the year at various festivals and events. The group meets once a week to show off what they’ve made and to pick up more orders.

“The pandemic slowed us up a little bit with shows being canceled,” she said Thursday. “But we were featured on CBS right before the holidays and we had a lot of orders from that we’ve been working on.”

Willis-Mackey said she and one other quilter will be at the Powerhouse for the Fiber Arts Festival to sell items and take orders.

The products are sold at the Tutwiler Center year-round and at art shows throughout the year.