A legacy unfolds

Grace and Arnold Rumbold shared a lifetime together — and a love of creativity, community and learning. (Photo: supplied)

For Grace Rumbold, cloth was a treasure to be celebrated and reimagined, whether it was made into garments for her family or transformed into colourful quilts.

"Fabric was always of interest to her", her husband, Arnold Rumbold, recalls fondly. "I used to kid her that if a new fabric store opened, she’d be there with her friends. She never went into a shop where she couldn’t immediately figure out something she wanted to make."

Carefully organized and stored in the basement of the family home, the collection of vibrant textiles was a source of joy for his late wife of 67 years, he says. "She’d go down and sort them to feel and enjoy them. To have amassed all that fabric was, to her, a treasure."

Using that trove to craft beautiful clothing and quilts, including as a longtime member of the Edmonton and District Quilters Guild, was a creative outlet for Grace, he adds. "It was her use of fabrics and the expression (it provided) that got her involved." Grace contributed to two Quilters Guild Scholarships with the Department of Human Ecology in the ALES Faculty over the years and passed along her love of fabrics and textile history interests to her daughter Kathryn, who pursued a career in museums and preservation.

That passion and respect for bringing bolts of cloth to life has now turned into a generous legacy that will help preserve an equally vibrant collection of textiles held by the University of Alberta.

Anne Lambert, a champion of clothing and textile history at the University of Alberta. (Photo: Richard Siemens)

A $500,000 gift made by Grace’s family in her memory will support the Textile Conservator Endowment, which has been established to preserve and maintain the U of A’s Anne Lambert Clothing and Textiles Collection.

Containing more than 26,000 artifacts with local, national and international significance that span 350 years of history, the collection is one of the largest and most diverse held by a Canadian university. It includes everything from pre-Columbian South American textiles to 18th-century silk garments.

"The support provided through the Rumbolds’ contribution is an immense step forward in reaching our goal of hiring a full-time conservator for the collection," says curator Anne Bissonnette, a professor in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences.

The collection is a unique hands-on learning and teaching resource used by U of A scholars and also shared through public exhibitions, so it’s important to protect the textiles and artifacts from the wear and tear that comes with handling and display, she notes.

"The garments in the collection, some of them fragile, aren’t just vestiges of the past, and because we use them in the classroom for experiential learning and for exhibition, that takes a toll."

"The highly specialized skills of a conservator contribute to the care, stabilization and preservation that allow us to safeguard these objects.”

Contributing to the Textile Conservator Endowment was a fitting way to honour his mother, says Dave Rumbold. 

"It’s an extension of her for our family. We just recognized that this project was so much a part of Grace’s interests. She’d be pleased that a portion of her estate is going towards the field and objects that she would love, to teaching , and to allowing that marvellous collection to be used and seen by more people."