a sewing/pattern-making studio class

Feminist Quilting Bee is a sewing/pattern-making studio class that explores how artists create new artworks while gossiping, warning, and informing one another as a form of care. Deeply informed by feminist essays such as Kwame Holme's "What's The Tea: Gossip and the Production of Black Gay Social History," and Alessandro Portelli's "What Makes Oral History Different," and Katrin "Horn's Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive," this course will use a variety of current discussion of feminist social topics as case studies to be workshopped and explored during sewing class.

In this course we will learn the fundamentals of your sewing machine: repair and cleaning alongside demonstrations in pattern making, riveting, applying batting, stitch, correcting, banner design, sail making, and building with industrial sculptural fabrics. We will explore a variety of contemporary and historical approaches to archiving textiles, which includes how we describe, catalogue, appraise, and restore quilts.