Fiber artist Martha Ressler has taken wool felt, vintage mementos such as postcards, pins, buttons, tour book snippets, matchbooks and other found objects and sewn them into miniature quilts embellished with hand stitching that depict life in Berks County s 72 municipalities.
She has put together 87 framed art quilts using a raw-edge applique style to create the Berks in Stitches on display at Art Plus Gallery in West Reading through Dec. 30.
She was inspired to undertake such a project after viewing a 2013 exhibit in Pittsburgh by artist and friend Ron Donoughe called 90 Neighborhoods. He used 90 plein air paintings to tell the story of Pittsburgh neighborhoods, which is where Ressler lived at the time.Â