Many Hands Make A Quilt
Short Histories of Radical Quilting
Common Threads Press | Illustrated by Saffa Khan
“When we grant quilts authority, we expand our conception of who can tell meaningful stories and how these stories are preserved. We shift our expectations of history’s protagonists. We discard our attachment to placing individual heroes on pedestals and look instead for history’s collective carers: the artists who showed up to the fight bringing useful resources for the long struggle ahead.”
Jess Bailey, Public Library Quilts
The Second Edition of Many Hands Make a Quilt, released August 15, 2024
“Bailey's engaging writing draws the reader in for a beautifully illustrated tour of the relationship between quilting and activism.”
— Ferren Gipson
“Utterly beautiful and, ultimately, intensely political. A history of the myriad layers of quilting, it is, too, in its core, a history of love. Of tenderness. Of revolution. Of hope... The story Bailey is telling in her work is a story we all need to hear, now more than ever.”
— Kerri ní Dochartaigh
Stock Many Hands Make a Quilt through our bookshop distributor Art Data.
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Many Hands is stocked in bookshops & art institutions around the world from grassroots initiatives like Glasgow’s Good Press to the Stewart Hall Library and the Royal Academy in London.
Published by an independent press amplifying feminist, queer, & intersectional histories of art
Committed to employing women, non-binary, and queer artists and authors, Common Threads Press publishes writing about art history and activism. Zines are small, independently published books that traditionally uplift marginalised stories and voices. Recent work has included the essay collection Radical Possibilities: Art and Queer Identity & a fundraiser zine for the Black Art History Library.
Common Threads Press zines are stocked at the Tate Modern & Tate Britain bookshops, The People’s History Museum, Manchester, Lighthouse: Edinburgh’s radical bookshop, and Tatter Blue Library in New York among others. Get in touch if you’d like to stock Many Hands Make a Quilt.
The Navajo Quilt Project
“The Navajo Quilt Project gathers fabric and quilting supplies to donate to the quilters that live on the Navajo Nation. We also collect monetary donations and use them to purchase scissors, thread and batting so that the grandmas can quilt in the winter and make beautiful, warm blankets for their families.”
All proceeds from sales of our original artist posters benefit quilters from the Navajo Nation. Quilts in these communities are both a form of artistic expression and a necessary household item in the winter. You can learn about Susan Hudson and the Navajo Quilt Project in Many Hands Make a Quilt. The Navajo Quilt Project accepts both material donations of quilting supplies and monetary donations through a small fabric store in Los Angeles.
Many Hands Make a Quilt is funded by the Costume & Textile Association's Geoffrey Squire Memorial Bursary 2021 for textile research in the UK.
This award will also fund Common Threads Press’s next zine about cloth: Diasporic Threads: Black Women, Fibre & Textiles written with textile artist and arts educator Dr Sharbreon Plummer.