In northern Durham County, where the landscape reflects its rural antecedent, the Little River Senior Center is a venue for the domestic craft of quilting. A permanent fixture in one of the center's largest rooms is a quilting frame around which seniors have gathered for years to sew seams and swap stories. On some occasions as many as sixteen people work on a single quilt at the same time. The group consists of beginners as well as experienced quilters. The Little River Senior Center offers them an opportunity to come together and learn from one another, to pass on informally a variety of skills, techniques, and patterns that have accumulated from a diversity of pasts.

Among the Little River quilters are Pearl Holman, Claude Mack, Mallie Holman, Louvenia Higgins, Irene Long, Rilla Whitted, Pauline Parker, and Georgia Johnson, most of whom grew up in rural northern Durham County and recall farm life during the Depression. Rilla Whitted is considered by the group to be one of the more experienced quilters. Born on a tobacco farm in 1915 in the northern part of the county, she counted quilting among her daily duties. She grew up in a family of six, working in the fields with her siblings—planting, harvesting, and priming tobacco, working in the garden, and feeding and milking the cows. Then came her domestic duties: patching clothes, quilting, cleaning the house, and preparing meals. She learned to sew from her mother, out of necessity. "Clothes needed mending and quilts were needed on the beds to keep warm," she says.

To know Braima Moiwai is to know the folk art of Sierra Leone. There's a song in his smile and laughter in his hands. There's the bittersweet memory of now-gone cocoa plantations and backyards filled with dance, drums, and a flurry of sun-dried cloth. There is also the devastating residue of a war-torn homeland. Braima Moiwai paints his memories of home in scenes abstract and literal with colors dark and bright. His tools are beeswax, pigment, a cast iron pot, needle, and thread. The results are patterns that ripple out to the edge of the cloth in overlapping spheres or diamonds. Even more intricate patterns emerge like ripples on water—these are accomplished with hundreds of stitches.

In Sierra Leone the mende word for hand-dyed cloth is Gara. Gara is distinctive among batik techniques because of its depiction of village scenes, its earthy or natural color schemes, and its use of repeating abstract symbols that often hold spiritual significance. Braima Moiwai's family has been making gara "from time immemorial." Braima was born one of nine children on his family's farm in Sierra Leone, West Africa, in 1960. In 1986, after attending college and teaching high school, he moved to the United States. A year later, following his desire to teach, Braima became an artist-in-residence with Creative Arts in the Public Schools (CAPS), a program of the Durham Arts Council. Braima seeks a direct link between making gara and maintaining his cultural identity. "When I came to this country, especially getting to work with schoolchildren and . . . museums and community centers," he remembers, " I felt I had to share, because what I know canıt just remain in me. I have to share."

Galia Goodman and Steve Henry Herman are active members of the Triangle's Jewish community, where their distinctive and beautiful objects are proudly displayed in homes and synagogues. Indeed, a tzedakah (charity) box, made collaboratively by Steve and Galia, is presented to all local thirteen-year-olds upon their becoming a Bar or Bat Mitzvah ("one who performs commandments"). Steve crafts the wooden form and Galiaıs paper design adorns it, and thus the Torah's commandment of tzedakah becomes a visible element of religious observance in many Jewish homes.

Galia Goodman, born in Denver, Colorado, has lived in Durham since 1983. Galia began to study Jewish papercutting and calligraphy in 1981 while living in Berkeley, California. She has worked with such Israeli artists as Yehudit Shadur (papercutting) and Izzy Pludwinski (calligraphy). Galia's papercuts are used in the Jewish community in traditional ways and are based on historical motifs and standard texts. Marriage contracts (ketubot) and eastern wall markers (mizrachim) are among the objects she creates. A ketubah's Aramaic words describe the obligations of the bridegroom to the bride, and the mizrach ornaments the eastern wall of the home to show the orientation of Jerusalem.

Steve Henry Herman, a clinical psychologist at Duke University, came in 1971 to study at Duke, where he also apprenticed with Gerhardt Richter at the university's woodworking shop. He designs and builds synagogue furnishings for use in worship services. He also makes traditional ritual objects for the home, including a succah kit to enable non-woodworkers to build the special outdoor structure used for the Sukkot holiday. Steve also carefully crafts menorahs and dreidels (spinning tops), both for the festival of Hannukah; mezuzzot (door markers containing a blessing in Hebrew), and spice boxes used to mark the end of Shabbat (Sabbath). For the synagogue, Steve has created a shtender, a reader's lectern adapted from or adapted from a feature in temples in Europe, to hold a prayerbook; and a yad, or Torah pointer, used to read the Hebrew words on the Torah scroll.

The feast day for the patron saint of Mexico, La Virgen de Guadalupe, is one of the country's most important national holidays. This religious celebration honors the dark-skinned virgin who miraculously appeared to peasant Juan Diego in 1531. In Mexico every village and neighborhood celebrates this feast day (December 12) with a procession, dancers, a mass, and a fiesta.

In Durham, the Mexican community celebrates in much the same way. On the eve of December 12 a local apartment complex is transformed into a village square, hosting an altar and all-night dancing. Groups of men, called matachines, dance into the night, attired in homemade costumes and masks similar to those worn in villages and neighborhoods throughout Mexico. The next morning, at 5 a.m., a mass is held at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church. An evening procession and mass features floats, decorated with flowers and statues of La Virgen, and children dressed traditionally as the peasants who witnessed her appearance lead the procession.

Matachine dancers Cabay, Rigo, Pedro, Alan, Octaviano, Julio, Alan, Marcos, Luis Manuel, Alejandro, and Chalio (who is still in school and lives with his family) all grew up watching or dancing in celebrations for La Virgen. Their costumes consist of a corona, or headdress, decorated with large feathers and glitter, and a capa, a cape worn around the shoulders. They also wear an apron of decorated cloth and carry a sonaja, or rattle, to keep time with the music. In Mexico dancers and their families would go to an outdoor market each year to buy such supplies as glitter, feathers, dried gourds, and pictures of La Virgen to use in making their costumes. In Durham they shop at Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Michaels for craft supplies and at Mexican stores for pictures of La Virgen.

"Every house should know how to sew," according to Zakiah Moukanna, a Lebanese needleworker who moved to Durham in 1990. In her homeland, girls worked hard to develop their sewing, cooking, and childcare skills, hoping to put them to use as good wives and mothers. But Zakiah's skills with a needle far surpass that of crafting the family's clothing.

On a field of black velvet, Zakiah carefully applies individual sequins and beads in rich gold, silver, and metallic reds and greens to shape Arabic words and phrases that reflect her desire to honor God. Her wall hangings blend traditional Islamic aesthetic principals of balance, symmetry, and geometry with a personal vision and voice. Political history and her experiences living in the Middle East have prompted Zakiah to add new designs to her repertoire; she often chooses to depict Muslim landmarks and symbols of Palestinian nationalism in her artwork. Many of Zakiahıs needlework creations symbolize her ethnic and national pride.

Zakiah was born in southern Lebanon, in a small town near Tyre on the Mediterranean Sea. As an older child in a family of seven, she was forced to leave school at the age of twelve when her father was killed in an accident. Together with her mother and older sister, she began working in the fields at a local farm to help support the family. At fifteen, she married and moved with her Palestinian husband to Kuwait, where he pursued a career in accounting. While raising four children, she made furniture covers, clothing, and curtains for her new home. Kits to create these sequined wall hangings were available in the marketplaces of many Middle Eastern cities, but Zakiah found inspiration in the homes of many friends who proudly displayed their own needlework creations. She took ideas from the pieces she saw and then went home to develop her visions. Zakiah and her family lost their home and many of their possessions during the Gulf War. They became refugees and were resettled to North Carolina. The political events in the Middle East had a profound impact on Zakiah's creative expressions.

A flashy splash of silver lame, a demure veiling of black lace, a confectionery froth of fringe—these are the flights of fancy that characterize the millinery creations of Mrs. Clellie White. In her Durham home, the Henderson, North Carolina, native captures imagination in the form of beautiful, sculptural headgear in a variety of fabrics.

Clellie White learned her trade in New York City, where she moved in her early twenties. She had always been fond of hats and "fooled around" with making or remaking her own, but it was at the urging of a cousin that she took up the craft in earnest. The two young women would travel two hours each way by train to Brooklyn to study hat-making techniques in the 1940s. The program terminated before they had finished their training, but Mrs. White was determined to learn the trade, so she and her cousin found another class in Manhattan's fashion district. Mrs. White decided to specialize in making hats from woven fabric rather than from straw or wool. It was a case of an artist finding her medium. She has combined her training with her innate creativity to produce highly original, sought-after headwear. "Those ideas in your head just come to you and you can create the most gorgeous hats. I don't think there's nothing out there like them," she says.

In the early 1970s Durham County experienced significant urban growth that transformed the landscape and lifestyle of many of its rural residents. Perhaps no one articulates this change better than forty-four-year-old Ken Maynor, a modeler and metalsmith.

Ken was born and raised in southern Durham County. From the 1930s through the '50s his grandfather ran a general store in Lowe's Grove that catered to farmers and the agricultural business. His father, Ronald Maynor, was a brick mason and his mother, Charlotte, was a housewife. Consequently Ken grew up with a tool in his hand and learned about craftsmanship by helping his father.

Ken, however, began to work with metal rather than brick. While attending the aviation program at Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, North Carolina, Ken learned to weld and fuse metal. Soon he was making small model airplanes out of Army surplus aircraft parts for his friends, classmates, and instructors. "For those airplanes I'd use parts from C-47's, Army Birddogs, and Army helicopters used in Vietnam." By using parts recycled from real aircraft Ken established a close connection between the object and the personal experience of the buyer. "Those guys could look at the pieces and know exactly what aircraft they came from," he says. Similarly, Ken makes a variety of metal creations from scrap farming equipment: sunflowers made from horseshoes, birds made from field plows, and giant snails made from wagon wheels, for example. He prefers using early 20th century farming equipment, because of the quality of craftsmanship involved in creating it. Ken continues the tradition of innovative craftsmanship by designing and building fully operational mechanical models, such as a biplane with foot petals, a Model-T fire truck, and a 1937-A John Deere tractor complete with a square baler. by making working models, he adapts knowledge and skills historically valued in his family and community to his comtemporary environment.