Dawne Hoeg:
I am Dawne Hoeg, and I am the Executive Director of Stitch Buffalo. I am originally from Boston, Massachusetts, and have been now in Buffalo for 18 years.

I come from a family of women. I have nine aunts all sewed their own clothes when they were teenagers. And it just was part of my life growing up, and I rejected it for a long time, and then I found myself in college, and I was doing some repair work for friends, and at that time, I was in packaging and science design. I worked for a company for a couple years doing that, and then I decided that that wasn't really what I wanted to do. So I went back out and started to study the textile arts—historically as well as studio, and developed my own studio practice in dyeing and patterning fabrics and garment construction.

I worked as a teacher for quite a while now. When I started the community workshops for refugee women here in Buffalo, I started with embroidery because it was the easiest materials and supplies for me to transport to a rented space that I had. And so—I invited refugee women from all of the resettlement agencies to join the workshop if they were interested in learning a technique or sharing one that they may have brought from their country. Those workshops started and grew very quickly. Women knew the skill of embroidery, but they also really wanted to have community, and so we would come together in a rented space once a week for three hours.

After months, it was close to a year, at one point I looked up and there had to be, like 50 women in this room. I was like, this is crazy. This needs a little bit more structure to it. And so then I decided to get some help and start a nonprofit organization called Stitch Buffalo that would support refugee and immigrant women in the textile arts.

Handiwork is a very accessible discipline, if you will, because it has touched all of our lives in one way or another, whether you're male or female, or whatever gender you are, at some point, you've had to run the drawstring through your shorts or sweatpants, or you've had to mend a hole sew a button on, and so the tools and the material are very familiar to all of us. It has a wonderful way of settling whatever is churning inside of you to a meditative practice or something that is just allowing you to relax in your, in your, in your being.