The Tree of Us in a March Chinook: Stitching a Scattered Community Into a Quilt

Swarthmore College student Hannah Watkins organized a community quilt project during the Covid-19 pandemic. Photo: Hannah Watkins

Last fall, I was one of only a handful of Swarthmore College seniors who returned to campus. Along with a few dozen other upperclassmen serving as resident assistants to the freshmen and sophomores, I did my best to find a rhythm without my usual college friends.

One November afternoon, I walked through campus along paths with no other students in sight and several images came to mind. The first was an African motif often seen in quilts, which I had learned about in a class: a tree representing family, community, and life. 

The second was a storm, called a chinook, common in Alaska, where I grew up. In a chinook, a warm winter wind blows up from the south at 80-100 miles an hour, melting the snow. As a child, I would lie in bed and listen to the gusts approaching, the wind growing closer until it became a high-pitched whistling scream and the house creaked and groaned. I saw the trees bend so far it seemed they would never stand up straight again. When the wind finally stopped — sometimes days later — the ground would be thickly littered with splintered branches and a few fallen behemoths. 

The pandemic was like a chinook, I thought: a strange reversal of ordinary nature. In a chinook, friendly cold becomes sudden and ominous warmth. In the pandemic, gatherings of people —  usually joyful — had become frightening and dangerous. 

As I walked between the deserted academic buildings and cafes where no students sipped coffee, the third image came to me: a vast, multicolored tree bent nearly to the ground in a terrible wind, twigs and leaves ripped away and spiraling off to rejoin the earth. A deep-rooted tree that would survive this ferocious storm, but not without crying out in pain and grief as parts of it were ripped away. 

I imagined using fabric that had been in intimate contact with the bodies of members of the Swarthmore College community — clothing, masks, aprons — cutting them into pieces, and stitching them back together into a quilt that embodied this pandemic year: a quilt of all of us.

Learning to Quilt

Hannah Watkins’ 2018 quilting class with the quilts they made. Alicia Ruley-Nock, one of the two teachers, is standing. Watkins is to her left in a striped black shirt. Photo: Laurence Kesterson

I learned about quilting in a class I took in spring 2018 called Black Art: Quilting as Culture. Taught jointly by history professor Allison Dorsey and Alicia Ruley-Nock, a Black quilter (both women are Swarthmore residents), the class was transformative for me, shifting the way I understood art. The concepts I learned — the way tradition and oral history are reflected in textiles, how what is necessary can also be beautiful, and that quilts are physical artifacts of human strength and perseverance — became fundamental to me.

But what I connected with most deeply was sewing. In the warm room, I leaned over the brightly patterned cloth, pressing the seams flat, listening to the soothing chunka-chunka of the sewing machine. A few years later, in a class on the psychology of well-being, I came to identify that feeling as flow — the utter immersion in the present. A state of enhanced creativity, relaxation, and bliss: that was quilting. 

The Process

To get my idea of a community quilt off the ground, I reached out to many different offices at the college, trying to secure funding, support, and a place to work. I logged 95 hours of work before even touching fabric. 

I sent an email to the whole community requesting fabric donations. Many people responded, offering old shirts and bandanas. One of my mentors, Professor Sara Hiebert Burch, sent me a big bag of scraps from masks she had been sewing. The heads of Dining Services sent over an apron and a T-shirt. Cassy Burnett in engineering gave me several department shirts. 

Over a dozen students learned to embroider and sent me beautiful border squares. Naomi Horn’s was of pies she had baked, and Susan McHarris sent one with a TV-headed human figure to encapsulate her feeling of pandemic isolation. 

Quilt-making has several distinct stages, each with its own joys. First you design the pattern. I tried to find a balance between making the tree detailed enough to be recognizable and simple enough to complete in the four months before I graduated. 

Cutting comes next. The quilt comprises some 1,080 pieces, including 32 hand-embroidered border pieces. I sweated over this step, knowing that I only had so much fabric to make mistakes with.

After cutting comes layout. I laid the 700-plus pieces on the floor of my sewing room and studied the pattern, trying to balance the colors. 

Next the process of piecing began, with hundreds of yards of cotton thread flying through the sewing machine that Professor Dorsey had bought three years earlier. My friends often kept me company as I pieced, working on their homework or the embroidered border while the machine gossiped busily with us, chunka-chunka-chunka.

After each seam was finished, it needed to be carefully pressed with the iron. The process was long, but doing it was sweet. As each of those 1,080 pieces passed under my fingers, I felt as though I was accomplishing something.

After the quilt top was finished, I pinned it securely to the fluffy cotton batting (the middle layer) and the backing. The backing was a plain sheet of muslin fabric covered with signatures and written responses to the question, “What got you through this past year?” (Some responses: “Talking to my mama.” –Francesca Rothell. “Laying in the sun.” –Aaron Urquidez “True connections are not based on time.” –Tiara Tillis). 

Then came the slow, delectable process of hand quilting. First, I place a section of quilt in an old-fashioned quilting hoop. Then I thread a small, sharp needle and sew through all three layers, securing top to stuffing to backing. I’m still in that stage now. 

Part of the beauty of quilting is that it is intimate. The quilt sprawls over my lap, and I stitch as I listen to Zoom lectures on our food system or the psychological underpinnings of well-being. It lies on my lap during the day, and, when I’m working late into the night, it often ends up sleeping with me at the foot of my bed. 

All spring, I sent regular mass emails to everyone interested in the project, squeezing in as many photographs, comments, and descriptions of the process as I could. I always received a multitude of responses, which buoyed me up. 

Each of the 12 border squares I embroidered illustrates some aspect of the past year that helped get me through. My favorite one depicts a tiny seedling. The leaves are made of a tiny scrap of African-print fabric — too small for Ms. Ruley-Nock to reuse — that I took with me from that quilting classroom two years ago. Into the roots of that seedling I sewed the names of the mentors who shaped this work: Alicia Ruley-Nock, Allison Dorsey, and my beading teacher when I was 12, Selina Alexander.

Soon, I will leave this campus for the last time. This quilt will share the weight of the memories of this strange, sorrowful, lonely year, and also the beauty of the community that we found together. 

Hannah Watkins is a member of the Swarthmore College Class of 2021.

A version of this article was originally published in The Phoenix.