Gather around the frame to celebrate the continuation of hand quilting from Wales to the north country, from Ireland to Scotland.

12pm – 4pm Intergenerational Public Quilting Bee.

This event lasts 4 hours, drop in.

All materials provided; all skill levels welcome.

At this Intergenerational Public Quilting Bee, you will be invited to reflect on your own creative practice – what you’ve inherited and what you hope to pass on. You will sit at a replica historical quilting frame made for the event by contemporary heritage furniture maker James Torble (CSM alumni) and be invited to stitch, write, draw, quilt, embroider or otherwise embellish the quilt top prepared to reflect your own inherited or gifted creativity alongside a widely intergenerational group of participants from staff and student body and local sewing groups across London and beyond. After the event the panels will be connected to make a new quilt.

Using all repurposed fabrics, and reusing orphaned patchwork blocks, textile hexagon shapes and fabrics you will be invited to make something fresh vital and new with old materials and ideas. The space will be hung with antique quilts, and you will meet diverse historical makers (through our multi-media programming) and get to know modern makers today as we recreate the intergenerational networks that once thrived around the frame.

This event is organised by Within the Frame: The continuation of hand quilting in a flat frame in the British Isles is endangered. Quilting history has been marginalised as a rural, working-class, domestic, and mostly women-led artistic practice. While patchwork has enjoyed widespread revival, the skill of quilting itself is often collapsed into generalist histories of patchwork. Hand quilting’s current visual and material culture is at risk of erasure as practices fade and matrilineal networks across generations are fracturing. Eager pupils often struggle to access a dwindling generation of, now older, skilled frame quilters. With the loss of this skill we also risk the loss of marginalised histories.

Within the Frame combines academic research with active practice and preservation, honouring the intergenerational exchange of technical, artistic, and embodied knowledge inherent to working at a quilt frame.

Founded by a historian Deb McGuire (LCF) and an art historian Dr Jess Bailey (UoE) who both hand quilt at a flat frame, Within the Frame is working to secure red list status for this cultural practice through Heritage Craft, a UNESCO accredited NGP for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the UK. Through gathering testimony and tracing intergenerational histories we seek to have “Quilting in a Flat Frame with a Rocking Stitch” (historically found in Wales, Scotland, England, Ireland and Northern Ireland) listed on the 2025 Red List of Endangered Crafts.

Help us to demonstrate the vivid, inclusive, democratic and ecological practice that hand quilting was and can be again.

This event is free to attend and open to all. Please register via Eventbrite to book your place.

Time: This Bee will take place 12-4pm in the Atrium, also book for our Free Public History Talk which follows at 6-8pm here. Please note that the Café on site will be open during the Bee and in the break, or local restaurants and cafes at East Bank are accessible for attendee’s refreshments.

Address: London College of Fashion, 105 Carpenter’s Road, London, E20 2AR - how to find us. Watch this video on how to get to LCF from Stratford tube station on the stories highlights on Instagram. Stratford is widely connected, on both the Central and Elizabeth tube Lines as well as via overland train and bus services.

Who we are: London College of Fashion and Within the Frame www.withintheframe.co.uk

Gather Around the Frame: A Public Quilting Bee