What started as a meeting with five people expanded to more than 40 members, all brought together through one medium: fiber arts.
The Fiber Arts Club at Ohio University, established in spring 2025, focuses on various fiber skills and crafts, including clothing customization, felting and quilting.
One of the main goals of the club is to make art accessible to everyone. Kate Hampel, area head for sculpture in the School of Art + Design, is faculty advisor for the club and helped inspire students to connect with the fiber arts.
“They are really trying to make it accessible and remove any sort of barrier that might exist,” Hampel said. “Sometimes when people are outside of a discipline, they might not join a club within that discipline, right? They have done a really great job of sort of making it about crafts and techniques without excluding anyone who's not an artist, or who doesn't have that background.”
The focus on accessibility shaped not only the club’s identity, but also the current semester project the club adopted. The Fiber Arts Club recently began a new semester-long, collaborative quilt-making project. Created alongside a local quilter and professor, the project aims to capture the club's identity.
This creative process includes machine sewing, piecing fabric and sewing the quilt on long-arm machinery. Each member gets the opportunity to create blocks of the quilt, resulting in a patchwork that reflects the range of skill levels in the club.
Kat Child, vice president of the Fiber Arts Club and junior studying art therapy, outlines how the community quilting project began and how the group is bringing it to life.
“There’s a lot of elements of fiber that go into quilting, and a huge community aspect,” Child said. “We decided that we would want to make a community quilt, so we reached out to a retired teacher named Cheryl.”
Child said Cheryl Howe, retired professor from OU, helped the Fiber Arts Club get off the ground. Howe owns a quilting business in Albany and works with a studio in Nelsonville.
Along with the donation, Howe helped the club organize a trip to Nelsonville to stitch the final quilting blocks together with a long-arm machine to finish the quilt. She introduced the fundamentals of piecing and quilting to the club and provides ongoing support as the club works on the quilting project.
Throughout the project, members not only get a creative outlet and connections through the arts but also the opportunity to establish community through the art medium.
“A lot of it is a shared goal and shared process,” Child said. “If you’re working on something with a group of people, you learn a lot about each other and what you’re working on. It’s been great to see people make connections.”
Child said the Fiber Arts Club is an outlet to build community through the creative medium. They said the club welcomes all skill and knowledge levels, providing a platform where members can get to know each other.
No matter the major, the Fiber Arts Club welcomes all fields of study. Julia Capasso, a freshman studying chemical engineering, became involved with the club last fall semester. The quilting project gave them a creative outlet outside their major.
Capasso said they are excited to see the result of the quilting project.
“I’m excited to see everyone’s blocks all together, because everyone has a different style and different colors that they’re picking,” Capasso said. “It will be exciting to see everything all together when we lay it out.”
The joining of the final blocks not only marks the completion of the full quilt but also highlights how the club’s community has strengthened throughout this semester-long project.
“(Working with other members) has been really great,” Capasso said. “I love working together with people. It’s a very welcoming environment, and we’re all learning new skills.”
