Quilts, Gardens and Weaving: Inheriting Knowledge Without Words

This piece was originally published in the August 2025 issue of Pandora Curated.

Illustrations by Swetha Prabakaran

Today, most of us are disconnected from the people who grow our food, make our clothes and build our homes. The crafts that once connected us and the earth have faded from view and taken with them fundamental relationships. A political enquiry into these media allows us to take craft seriously, as a tool to imagine and shape more cooperative, sustainable and liberating ways of life. This has never been more necessary than amidst our epoch of rapid accumulation, consumption and disconnection. Quilting, gardening and weaving thus come forth as not simply hobbies, but symbols of care, memory and resistance.  

Quilting

Figures, colours and patterns, enclosed in a fabric tapestry to be used and felt: Quilts are objects that resist dismissal. Every stitch is visible, the labour unapologetically present. For African American women, quilts are also an artefact of storytelling and documentation.

Like the braids which mapped routes for fleeing slaves, quilts, too, were a way to outline and foresee the freedom they sought (Whitehead, 2023). Harriet Powers’ 19th-century works are testimony to this power of pictorial narrative. She powerfully stitched local legends alongside Genesis and Exodus scenes; images of creation, bondage, and deliverance. By rendering sacred stories in tactile form, Powers wove together faith and resistance, reminding herself and future peoples of a promised liberation beyond earthly chains. 

Quilting, born out of resourcefulness, charts intimate lives alongside historical testimonies. bell hooks notes quilts made from her grandfather's suits or her mother's childhood dresses, with some to be pinned as wall art and others to warm in the cold of winter. This variety and enmeshed utility is where Faith Ringgold locates the magic of quilts: that space where art and life are interwoven. It is through this self-made narrative and use of personal materials that Whitehead states, ‘it was a way of having a gaze of our own – able to define ourselves instead of letting white people do it for us’ (2023).

A symbol of faith in the future, many quilts were made in preparation for married life or the birth of a child. Staring into their content, you are told to believe in something larger. It is a bounded, temporal process that both casts one back and wraps you in the thick of history, whilst forcing you to be present. Where did these materials come from? Who is yet to use this? And how can I transmit this story and skill to those who come after me? 

If any piece showcases this dialogical process, it is Hellen Murrell’s quilt ‘We Are All Warmed by The Same Sun’, depicting the brutal Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which enrolled six hundred black men in a study of the disease when left untreated. No informed consent was collected, and many suffered complications such as lasting brain damage or death. Murrell’s quilt preserves the shared humanity of these men and the viewer's likeness to them. 

Even in the face of history, we must understand the trajectory of oppression, that this could have been you, too. You must care, and shouldn’t look away. Speaking of the quilt, Murrell states, “I made this quilt hoping that it will remind us all that we are ultimately one family. If we are to give justice to the men [...] of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, we should not ever forget our humanity, nor let others forget theirs”.

Mazloomi, founder of the Women of Colour Quilters Network, describes the group as both a family and a means to preserve the skill for future generations, noting that continuation flourishes in collectivities like hers, as reported by Kaplan (2025). She found hundreds of quilters to join her association, challenging the normative belief that Black female creatives are historical exceptions. In truth, they were and are everywhere, producing gorgeous artefacts of time that can be passed on for centuries to come.

Domestic Crafting

Clean sheets, a blossoming garden, a warming meal, or mending hands—quiet, but persistent markers of home. Despite their simplicity, they root us, reminding us of who we are and where we come from. This is a method of living, passed on not always through words, but through gestures, textures, smells, and the careful repetition of tasks. It is work so often neglected, and yet, it is this foundational labour that lets us move through the world with ease. 

The 1970s Wages for Housework movement underscored the historical and economic significance of domestic labour. Much of this work has been unpaid, largely invisible, and overwhelmingly carried out by women, with ONS (2016) reporting that they perform 60% more unpaid labour than men. 

While economies value ‘productive’ work—labour that yields profit or measurable output— this ‘reproductive’ labour operates in the margins, enabling the conditions in which all other work can occur. The making of a family meal or the weaving of culinary traditions may seem trivial, but they are vital acts of cultural continuity, identity-building, and the transmission of intergenerational knowledge. What would cultural heritage be without the labour of women? And how do we come to know ourselves through these intimate, sustaining crafts?

This is the heart of care ethics: the understanding that care is not a peripheral virtue, but a foundational framework for life. To Gilligan (1982), moral reasoning emerges not through abstract principles of justice but through attentiveness, responsiveness, and relationships. It must be lived.  In this view, the home is not merely a domestic space but a site of profound moral practice. When your grandmother teaches you to iron or a parent sits beside you while you're unwell, they are not only performing care but transmitting a deeply relational ethic of mutual dependency and responsibility. It may not be grand, but whispers: Thank you for helping me move through this life. Teach me more, so I can help you through yours. 

This embodied knowledge sits, rocking gently at the back of the mind, only to roll forward in the most mundane moments; using the ‘secret ingredient’ or sewing as someone else did. It is the wisdom of movement and presence. As Bunn (2013) writes, craft produces a “specific form of attention, thought and talk,” and entails a “set of embodied potentialities”—a lived archive of human capacities and a quiet force for transformation.

In a society driven by speed, automation, and mass production, to slow down and craft is a radical act. Silvia Federici reminds us that women crafters were historically targeted during the violent events of primitive accumulation: their land was seized, tools destroyed, and their ancestral knowledge demonised as witchcraft. These were not random acts, but deliberate erasures of autonomous, non-capitalist ways of life.

To engage in domestic craft today, then, is not a mere nostalgic retreat; it is a reclamation, a rejection of disposability and a refusal to become detached. It is to reunite oneself with the rhythmic pulsing of life, the textures of material, and the care of the hands that came before.

Like quilts and meals, even the most ordinary vessels carry memory. A bowl may be made and sold once. But it is washed, filled, passed, and shared for decades, a quiet witness to nourishment, conversation, and care. In this way, the crafting and materials are responsive. They draw us back into a relationship with each other, the earth and the sacred ordinary.

Basket Weaving

As Marcel Mauss (1934) proclaimed, when we learn a skill, we also learn culture. Craft is not only a technique but a philosophy; a way of understanding and relating to the world. For Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013), basket-making became a practice for reconnecting with Indigenous knowledge systems and ancestral relationships with the environment. Through this craft, she reconnects to Potawatomi, the language of her Anishinaabe people, where the notion of animacy—the belief that the world is not made up of passive objects, but sentient beings filled with individual spirit—is enshrined.

Describing the process of gathering materials, she writes: “As the basket makers pound and peel, he is always moving back through time. The tree’s life is coming off, layer by layer.” The act becomes an invocation, collapsing temporal boundaries. Through craft, she enters into kinship with the tree, the land and the stories held in its rings. This kind of attentiveness reduces acts of degradation, with indigenous lands experiencing around a fifth less deforestation than non-protected areas (2021), and biodiversity uniquely thriving (2019). If the world is alive with you, rather than existing for you, then care becomes the natural mode of engagement. 

The process of learning a craft is visceral, learned through subtle, manipulative acts of the body that become intuitive over time. A Scottish creative centre, An Lanntair, explores how this embodied practice holds transformative potential in community contexts, particularly for disabled or elderly individuals. Bunn, in conversation with journalist Sandra Dick (2021), articulates how these events rekindle intergenerational relations in places where certain forms of labour have faded. In one moving account, a man living with extreme dementia reconnects with lost memories through the act of mending nets, a task once central to his life. It is in these quiet, tactile acts that local histories are preserved, and the care once given is returned.

To engage with craft is to submit to something beyond yourself. You can’t always manipulate materials as you wish; often, they manipulate you. You are at nature’s mercy, feeling its resistance and quiet instruction. As Kimmerer reminds us: “When we braid sweetgrass, we are braiding the hair of Mother Earth.” 

In a digital era of speed, abstraction and endless replication, craft grounds us in the material world, cultivating an attentiveness to the irredeemable and transient. Contrasting neoliberal individualism, handiwork forces us to be relational and reframe the self in the face of a communal, larger task. The value of this shift cannot be understated. 

Quilting circles, mutual aid kitchens or community allotments are not simply casual pastimes, but living infrastructure — sites where care, climate justice and decolonial politics take root. It is these spaces that teach circularity (mend, reuse, repair), honour indigenous stewardship, offer bottom-up self-governance, protect ecosystems, and demand that knowledge be communal and credited.

If we want a society that remembers, shares and sustains, we must approach these crafting conventions as vital methodologies of survival. Name the hands that keep you alive. Valorise care work. Learn and teach a craft. Support indigenous land defenders. Refuse the logic of extraction. The world will not be remade by speed or production alone; without grounding praxis, we cannot claim to be building a shared future, only consuming what’s left of it.

Edited by the Curated Editorial Team

Harriet Sanderson (she/her) is a Politics and Sociology student at the University of Edinburgh and a contributor to Pandora Curated. She is a writer interested in protest politics, direct action, and mutual aid, and investigates how the ‘local’ is contextualised within wider geopolitical shifts. She is passionate about bridging academic theory and lived experiences, and leans into this paradox in her writing.

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References:

• Bunn, Stephanie. “Woven Communities: A Case Study of Embodied Craft Practice and Intergenerational Knowledge of Scottish Vernacular Basketry.” Making Futures Journal, 2024, makingfutures-journal.org.uk/index.php/mfj/article/view/165. Accessed 2 July 2025.

• Dick, Sandra. “How Basket Weaving Could Help Stroke and Dementia Patients.” The Herald, 26 July 2021, www.heraldscotland.com/news/19467555.basket-weaving-help-stroke-dementia-patients/. Accessed 5 July 2025.

• Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004.

• Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press, 1982.

• Hooks, Bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. Routledge, 2009.

• Kaplan, Howard. “Making Quilts and Preserving Black History.” Smithsonian American Art Museum, 18 June 2025, americanart.si.edu/blog/quilts-preserve-black-history. Accessed 28 June 2025.

• Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “Braiding Sweetgrass.” Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013.

• Mauss, Marcel. “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society, vol. 2, no. 1, Feb. 1973, pp. 70–88.

• Murrell, Helen. “We Are All Warmed by the Same Sun.” Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2023, americanart.si.edu/artwork/we-are-all-warmed-same-sun-120759. Accessed 14 July 2025.

• Office for National Statistics. “Women Shoulder the Responsibility of ‘Unpaid Work.’” Ons.gov.uk, Office for National Statistics, 2016, www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/womenshouldertheresponsibilityofunpaidwork/2016-11-10. Accessed 25 July 2025.

• Schuster, Richard, et al. “Vertebrate Biodiversity on Indigenous-Managed Lands in Australia, Brazil, and Canada Equals That in Protected Areas.” Environmental Science & Policy, vol. 101, Nov. 2019, pp. 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2019.07.002.

• Seattle Medium. “Telling Our Stories: The Longstanding Tradition of Quilting.” The Seattle Medium, 21 June 2023, seattlemedium.com/telling-our-stories-the-longstanding-tradition-of-quilting/. Accessed 10 July 2025.

• Sze, Jocelyne S., et al. “Reduced Deforestation and Degradation in Indigenous Lands Pan-Tropically.” Nature Sustainability, vol. 5, Nov. 2021, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00815-2. Accessed 26 July 2025.

Keywords: History Of Quilting In African American Culture, Role Of Domestic Craft In Society, Basket Weaving Indigenous Knowledge, Quilting As Storytelling And Resistance, Care Ethics In Domestic Labour, How Craft Preserves Cultural Memory, Women And Unpaid Domestic Work, Quilting Circles And Community Building, Faith Ringgold Quilts Analysis, Harriet Powers Story Quilts, Craft As Resistance To Capitalism, Embodied Knowledge In Crafting, Importance Of Ancestral Craft Practices, Robin Wall Kimmerer Basket Weaving, Silvia Federici And Craft History