Even before factories and machines, before the notion of craft as a boutique commodity, there were gatherings that looked deceptively simple: groups of women sitting together with lengths of cotton and linen, needles slicing through fabric, stories spilling between stitches. We call these gatherings quilting bees, and for centuries they were far more than social calls with cake and gossip. They were places of collective life, where labour and conversation intertwined, and where women, in particular, made both quilts and community.
The phrase ‘quilting bee’ first took shape in colonial America, borrowing from an older sense of the word bee, meaning a communal gathering in which neighbours united their labour for mutual benefit. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, that benefit was practical as well as social: after women…
