WHY MAKE A QUILT? 

For thousands of years, people across cultures have made quilts to tell stories, survive harsh conditions, and bring comfort in times of change. The oldest known quilt dates back to Egypt around 3400 BCE. Since then, quilts have been stitched from whatever was available — outgrown or torn clothing transformed into warmth, protection, and beauty. They have always carried memory as much as function: women gathering at quilting bees to stitch and share stories, enslaved Africans believed to have used quilt patterns to communicate routes to freedom, families passing quilts down as living records of their lives.

When we make a quilt today, we step into this lineage. To select, cut, and piece together fabrics is to honour a rich history of craft and oral culture. Textiles are more than material — they are witnesses of experience. A quilt made from personal textiles becomes a story you can hold in your hands, wrap yourself in, or fold away like a love letter for another time. They carry memory, warmth, and care from the people who wore them, touched them, and now pass them on.

People come to Stories for Inanna at different thresholds. A quilt can hold you in moments that feel in-between — after a breakup, in the fog of burnout, during slow recovery from illness, or at the fragile start of something new. It can carry the presence of someone lost — clothing stitched into memory you can touch. It can honour an older version of yourself, by transforming clothes from a painful chapter into something soft, strong, and beautiful. It can celebrate beginnings — a child’s birth, a chosen family, a new home, a new way of being. It can also be collective: kin, friends, or communities offering pieces of fabric that become one shared story, carried in cloth.

I love to make quilts for people who want to wrap every part of themselves with it — full of warmth, texture, and colour. For those who take their quilt out of the closet like a hidden love letter written by their younger selves. For those who invite their people to witness their becoming, or who dance barefoot on it. For those who keep it quiet, secret, and sacred — using it as a protective shield for their witchcraft.

Here are some examples of quilts I imagine and love to make:

– Clothes worn during the years a chosen family was built, stitched into a shared fabric of belonging.
– A quilt for a child whose parents separate, with fabrics gathered from everyone who loves them.
– A parent making a quilt for their child with fabrics from their own history — a way to pass on resilience in tangible form.
– A person returning home after years abroad, carrying fabrics from many places sewn into a map of belonging.
– A baby quilt made from maternity clothes.
– A quilt for someone in illness, stitched together by a whole community.
– A gift for a grandmother moving into care, made from family textiles that keep home close.
– A quilt from clothes no longer fitting after gender-affirming surgery.
– A quilt made from several generations of women, carried into women’s circles.

What makes a quilt special is the time, presence, and care it holds. When made by hand, it becomes intimate, textured, alive with memory. A quilt can last lifetimes: hung as art, or slept with for comfort. It becomes a companion, carrying stories through seasons and generations.

Stories for Inanna honours the unique, imperfect, and intuitive. By marking passages that are deeply personal yet collectively human, we learn to be more present with changes. A quilt turns transition into transformation, absence into presence, fabric into memory. Each one is an invitation to honour the deep work of being alive.