Pe-ac-ed with Love

On this Anzac Day, it is timely to highlight the exhibition Pe-ac-ed with Love - Story Quilts by War Veteran Families that will be on display at the Sydney Quilt Show in June.

Maree Gebhardt received a $3000 Guild Scholarship in October 2005 and used this funding to coordinate the Partners of Veterans Association quilt exhibition United in Love We Create Peace that was held in Canberra in August 2006. Family members of war veterans were invited to "record their life journeys in textiles through the design and creation of individual quilts and an accompanying written story."

Forty seven quilts were featured in the exhibition. 90% of the participants had never made a quilt before and 50% had no sewing experience.

Expertise Events have selected this exhibition, renamed Pe-ac-ed with Love, to be a major touring exhibition for 2007. Maree Gebhardt and Margaret Rehorn, National Project Coordinator from the PVA, urge all Australians to see these historical quilts and consider the trans-generational cost of war to veterans, their families and the wider community.

Peaced at Last by
Margaret Rowe-Keys, Melbourne
Peaced at last is a play on words indicative of the peace I have found at the end of my long journey as a daughter affected by the Vietnam War. The tree is symbolic of my life. When I was sixteen my father left home and that broke my heart. The tree branches off in different directions - one going straight up showing how I believed my father's life was heading; the other is my life veering violently sideways, losing direction.