The University of Manitoba campuses are located on original lands of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Ojibwe-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and on the National Homeland of the Red River Métis. More
For my remote educational outreach program, I will be hosting a quilt square making workshop. This project will consist of attendants joining a Zoom call where the guest artist will then host a class detailing how to make a quilt square. Afterward, there will be an opportunity to share everyone’s work, fostering a sense of community and kinship between attendants. My intentions for the project were to run a quilt-making workshop for Black Queer youth under 29 in collaboration with the Textile Museum and the Sherbourne Health Centre’s BQY group. To make this more manageable, I will be running a quilt square making workshop within the ADEL class. This way, the activity is shorter and less intensive, but if a participant would like to add the square to a quilt in the future they can. The setting for the activity is any comfortable space where participants have some room to work, which could be a desk, a table, or even the floor. The materials required are scrap materials and/or fabric from old clothes, scissors, strong glue (ideally E-6000 or hot glue). An important aspect of this programming is the proven ability of quilting and community-based crafts to be a unifying method for creating kinship. In her article Making Certainty and Dwelling Through Craft, researcher Magdalena Buchczyk analyzes the ethnographic research she did into crafts as a means of making certainty and as a solution to feelings of unpredictability, lack of control, and insecurity about the future. Although this research was done pre-Covid, many of the emotions which the participants describe as being soothed and abated by the craft activities are being felt on a global scale today. By bringing together participants to make a quilt square in a community-based activity, those feelings of uncertainty, insecurity, anxiety, and stress can be diminished. In taking up this project I hope to create a space that feels welcoming and safe to members of my community who are in search of kinfolk and foster a creative atmosphere to allow people to take up space and take time for themselves. For me, this experience is intended for the Black Queer Youth in my community of downtown Toronto. This is a group that is very important to me, as they are extremely underserved and often unsafe in spaces intended for Black or LGBTQ2S people respectively.