Toni Reece: Hi there. This is Toni Reece, and welcome to the Get Inspired! Project for Berks County Living Magazine. Today I have Kimberly Servello with me. Welcome to the Project.
Kimberly Servello: Hi, Toni. Thank you for having me.
Toni: You are quite welcome. So, Kimberly, take a moment and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Kimberly: Well, I moved to this area, unbelievably now, but in 1989, so I’ve been here quite a while. I currently work for the Reading Public Library. I’ve been there almost seven years, and I am the marketing coordinator.
Toni: Okay. You’ve been there seven years, did you say?
Kimberly: Just about. Seven years in March coming up.
Toni: You guys just won a major award.
Kimberly: Yes, we did.
Toni: That’s pretty cool. Quickly tell us what the award was?
Kimberly: We won the Medal for the Institute of Museum and Library Science; a national medal.
Toni: Okay. That’s amazing. Alright. Well, let’s get into the Get Inspired! Project. Kimberly, what does inspiration mean to you?
Kimberly: For me, it means a passion to create. I can be inspired by the people around me; sometimes by something I read, or even just simply a color.
Toni: Do you know when you’re inspired?
Kimberly: Yes, I do. Absolutely. When I’m inspired, my heart races and my I can feel my pulse beating. It’s kind of addictive, even. Your brain starts to race when you connect thoughts and start putting something together.
Toni: Does it happen often to you?
Kimberly: Yes. Sometimes in little ways, and sometimes in larger projects.
Toni: When was the last time you were inspired?
Kimberly: Probably the last time was in October. I read…NPR put together a list of their listeners’ 100 favorite scary stories. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to put that together, to take those and see what the library has in digital form, and create a webpage for it so that our readers could quickly access all the scary stories that they wanted to listen to or read?” I put together the web page, and also then a newsletter with scary music that we had as well in our collection.
Toni: Oh my gosh! That is so cool. That’s the last time you were inspired in a big way, I would imagine, right?
Kimberly: Yeah, semi-big.
Toni: Semi-big? Okay. You’ve touched on this now. The second question of the Project is how do you take that inspiration and put it into practice here in Berks County? You’ve just given a lovely example of how you’ve taken something that has inspired you and have done it for the library and for those that use the library, correct?
Kimberly: Right.
Toni: What is another example of when you were inspired and you put that addictive, creative feeling into practice here in Berks County?
Kimberly: Before I worked at the Library, on the side — it wasn’t my employment — but I designed and created Elizabethan period embroidery. I taught Elizabethan embroidery through the Embroidery Guild of America. I mean, I was constantly being inspired by books that I read. When you’re working on Elizabethan period embroidery, you have to do a lot of research. You’re pulling up extant pieces in museums or reading history of the time just to see what the embroiderers were doing. For them, these were positions of employment. They had put up employment ads in the newspapers. They were teaching families’ children. It was definitely a lifelong work project for them.
Toni: Tell me an example of a piece in that era that you would embroider. Tell me what that looks like.
Kimberly: Well, actually, I was part of a really cool project. Embroiderers from all over the world came together in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and we worked on recreating a 17th Century embroidered jacket. It was totally covered in a scrolling floral motif. Some of the threads were silk, and some were actual gold that you used to embroider. We recreated a piece, and through that, we learned a lot about the embroiderers…because in the 17th Century, these were professional embroiderers that would have been creating this; not the wife sitting at home by herself which people romantically imagined in years past. These were created in workshops.
The piece that we created was absolutely gorgeous, especially in candlelight, which is what it was made to be shown in, of course. When we were finished with it, the museum…it’s going to be housed in The Met Museum. They did a little exhibit, so it was down at Winterthur for a while, which is where I got to see it finished. Then, it will be housed permanently in The Met Museum, along with all of the embroiderer’s names and which motifs they worked on; what part of the jacket you worked on as well.
Toni: So, your name is going to be part of the list. It’s already on display. It’s going to The Met, and your name is there as one of the embroiderers in this museum to this piece that you were part of?
Kimberly: Yes.
Toni: Well, I mean, how cool is that?
Kimberly: It was very exciting to have people come from all over the world. The way that everybody found out about it was online. Nothing else was done to promote it. It’s just word of mouth. People, embroiderers passing it on.
Toni: You were inspired to just do that.
Kimberly: Yes.
Toni: Fantastic. So, who in Berks County inspires you?
Kimberly: It would be the group of people I work with in the foundation building for the Library. Several very creative people, and that would be Linda Capozello, Daniel Egusquiza and Becca Burke. Recently, she [Becca] left for Ireland to spend a year in Ireland. She just left over the summer. We just have a really good team, and we work very well together.
Toni: Anybody else inspire you, other than your work colleagues?
Kimberly: Not currently, no.
Toni: Okay. Well, hopefully they will come along.
Kimberly: All of my creative energy right now goes into my position at work, and I really enjoy it.
Toni: Oh, that’s fantastic, and I would imagine the fellow people that you did this project with, I would imagine they were inspiring as well. How long ago was that?
Kimberly: The jacket?
Toni: Yes.
Kimberly: Oh, it was around 2003 or 2004, I think.
Toni: So, Kimberly, what would you like your legacy to be?
Kimberly: Well, because I was teaching embroidery — it’s actually a two-part thing, I think. Because I was teaching embroidery, I still hear from some of the women that I taught. They’ll tag me on Facebook or send me pictures of a project of mine that they came across in a magazine. Or, if they’ve added their own special touch to, or maybe they’ve won an award recently. Someone that I taught won an award at a museum in Delaware for her embroidery. She submitted it in an exhibit that they had. I love hearing from people that I’ve taught and what they’re doing with it.
The other part of that is, through the Library, you probably are aware that libraries are fighting for our existence right now. We’ve lost a lot of funding, and that’s not just in the US, but worldwide. The libraries that are going to survive are going to be those that can recreate themselves. Reading Public Library has been recreating ourselves for two or three years, and it’s been exciting to be part of the process, and to watch everybody’s position expand. I hope that in some small way, that something I’ve done can help to make our library a library of the future.
Toni: It sounds as though you already have. I mean, from the projects that you’ve worked on with the embroidery and the students that you’ve taught who now have their own legacy of the work that they’ve done, and to the library work as they’re reinventing themselves. It sounds to me like you’re living your legacy. Way to go.
Kimberly: Thank you.
Toni: You’re welcome. Thank you so much for showing up for the Project.
