NPR

These 'Ties That Bind' Explore Life With Father

A group of women calling themselves the Catskilled Crafters took apart hundreds of donated neckties to make fabric art exploring their relationships with their fathers and the men in their lives.
Each of these vignettes required 37 "hexies," little hexagonal scraps cut from donated neckties.

In the fall of 2017, a dozen women in New York's Catskill Mountains came together for a craft project. Many of them were New York City transplants, and most were either retired or semi-retired; they needed something to occupy their minds and hands during the long, snowy Catskills winter.

What they found was old neckties, hundreds of them, which they cut into small hexagons to make a quilt — of sorts. The group, which dubbed itself the , pieced the hexagons into a giant 10-foot-long tie called Big Daddy, and dozens of foot-wide hexagonal cloth "vignettes." Local sculptor and performance artist — and all of it is now on display in the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

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