Portia Marie York

“each stitch carries a memory, weaving the stories our ancestors refused to let the world forget.”

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Blankets

Handmade blankets offer warmth, but they also offer dignity. They are quiet testaments to creativity, stitching together community, memory, and hope, continuing the tradition of storytelling through thread—using hook and yarn to transform history into living art.

 

Textiles have served as vessels of identity, resistance, and survival. For enslaved Africans in the United States, making blankets was not only a practical necessity but an act of cultural preservation. With limited materials, they repurposed scraps of cloth, weaving together patterns that echoed West African textile traditions—rhythmic repetition, symbolic motifs, purposeful color.