When she’s not jetting off to an exotic locale, anthropologist Paddy Moore spends her spare moments sewing quilt blocks with her mini-group. Called the Yorkville Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society, the Mendocino quilting group meets every month to work on auction quilts to raise money for scholarships and for their local volunteer fire department.
In addition to teaching anthropology at SRJC, Paddy works for the Leakey Foundation in San Francisco as its grants and programs officer. She travels extensively, but while she’s visiting far-flung countries, she’s thinking about her quilting group back home.
“We have T-shirts,” Paddy explained of the Yorkville Ladies Sewing Circle, “and I had wanted to bring one with me to Africa, but because it had the words ‘terrorist society’ on it, I decided that might not be such a good idea.”
Before she joined the Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society, Paddy asked the members who it is they terrorize. “Our husbands,” came the reply. “I’m in,” said Paddy.
That was five years ago, and in that time Paddy has made a twin-bed size quilt for one grandson, two crib quilts for additional grandchildren, and the lap-size (or nap-size, if you prefer) quilt pictured here. “Five years, four quilts,” she says. Not bad for a world traveler.
Of the quilt in this picture, Paddy said she made the Ohio Stars (one in each corner), and her fellow terrorists made the other blocks.
