7. 27. 2024

The Patience in Patchwork

Cleopatria Peterson

I have never created a quilt, but I used to work in a fabric store where sometimes helping folks create a quilt was part of my job. I enjoyed this work, the problem solving and pattern matching. In this way and others, I have often had a proximity to sewing without being good at it. I can sew a seam, but not well. When we mention a quilt, you might have your own personal touchstone, a quilt you think of. I think of the quilt that used to be on my bed in my childhood home. It was thrifted, and its makers had gotten lazy with the topstitching. My mother just recently threw it out, as it was falling apart; it had many holes that you could slip your fingers in, to feel the softness of the batting, which I found comforting. I slept under it many times. When I think of quilting as a practice, I think of my friends who quilt for newborns and newlyweds, the gifts they work upon to bestow on others. Creating a quilt takes time, and it can be quite a solitary endeavour, but there are times when community comes together in a quilt’s creation too.

I had the privilege of designing the festival poster for this year’s Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts, an annual arts and labour festival in Toronto, and out of all the poster concepts initially considered, the one that featured a quilt was the one I felt most connected to. I approached the poster design as someone who appreciates the craft of quilting and its rich, diverse history – a history that is deeply rooted in emancipatory labour practices. One example is the Freedom Quilting Bee, a Black women’s quiltmaking cooperative founded in the American South in 1966, providing jobs and leadership opportunities in its community. Some quilt designs themselves make use of motifs that depict acts or symbols of labour: the carpenter’s wheel, the monkey wrench, or the mariner’s star, to name a few. 

I wanted to connect symbols of art and labour, activism and community – not contrasting those ideas, but illustrating the fundamental truth that they and we are all connected. Our struggles, our labour, our health, our love are all connected, no matter our differences. In fact, those differences are often where our strength lies; they can provide openings for us to strengthen our bonds as people, because each person is like their own quilt square. The contrasts in where we come from, our identities, and our beliefs allow us to learn new patterns for existing in the world. Such understandings help us build united communities where our common (and distinct) needs are understood and we work, in our different ways, towards meeting them. Like all things, that takes time and effort, but a labour of love is often worth the effort. 

Quilts and quilting are prominent in many places and cultures, and although their fabrics, patterns, and meanings vary, the fundamentals of their uses and their construction are often similar. Whether used primarily as a blanket or an activist statement, whether created as a solo endeavour or with others, there is always a recognizable, consistent form of labour embedded in the object by the process of its fabrication. You can trace a quilt’s materials from the earth that grew them to the hands that processed, dyed, and spun them; the courier who shipped the bolt, the attendant that cut the metre (this used to be me), the seamstress that sewed each piece into a whole. If you look close enough, you can always see the many hands involved in a quilt’s creation. You can see the labour that went into it, the contributions of land, machine, and person.

Textiles are often understood to be women’s work – the work of the stitch by the fire as the men laboured elsewhere. Quilts historically have been a staple of poor and rural areas, and often those who live in those places are folks of colour, relegated to the outskirts as they perform labour that is often hard on a body. In such places and others, a quilt becomes something helpful and comforting from something little: from the scraps left over from new garments or items that have begun to wear but are fit to be repurposed. It is a slow creation, one that can’t be rushed, that takes time and planning. A quilt can remind us to take our time, a grace most of us are never afforded, instead sped up and ground down by capital at work. We should heed this reminder, and build power to resist the social forces that deny us such patience and intention in our labour. That patience, in the spaces where we can rest and breathe, lets us see the real value of what we have created. We can see the spots that might need a second stitch to strengthen them, a gap where new fabric could find its place. A quilt can teach us that together, with patience, we can build a durable patchwork through our communal labour. It can teach us that there is often a common thread to bind us together.