Author: Conor McArdle

It all started with a video we produced last year. Over IAP 2023, Lucy Sandoe, a PhD student in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, created a visually stunning quilt to represent the datasets of geophysics, her field of study. Divided into three panels, with each one depicting different aspects of geophysics, Lucy’s story inspired Jane Halpern, the Communications Officer in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, to seek out an opportunity with Project Manus to share her love, experience and passion for quilting with MIT students. In addition, Jane had access to a trove of incredible fabric that she helped deliver as a donation to MIT from the Maher family of Wayland, MA. This lifetime-sized donation of fabric will help teach future generations of MIT students about the craft.

Jane Halpern instructs her students outside of Metropolis Makerspace

“I thought Lucy Sandoe’s quilt, merging geophysics and quilting, was absolutely brilliant, but it also reminded me of some of the quilters that I've met,” Jane says. “Along my way, I found that there's a huge overlap between math minded folks with very active left brains who like graphs and analysis and numbers, and quilters.” What better place than MIT to offer a weeks-long quilting workshop!

“I learned that anyone at MIT, staff, faculty, student — anyone — can teach an IAP class. And I thought I could teach a quilting class. I could do that! So I started poking around, and I discovered that there was such a thing as Project Manus, that there were makerspaces!”

In Learn To Quilt, hosted in Metropolis between January 8 and February 2, 2024, students were taken through the entire process of making a patchwork quilt: from the design stage of choosing a pattern and a palette of fabrics, through cutting, piecing, basting and quilting, making meaningful choices relating to technique throughout and seeing how those choices affect their overall product (which was a large throw-size quilt, completed on the final day of the workshop).

The final quilts!

Combining visual art and tactile handwork, quilting is both an art and a craft, with a rich cultural and historical heritage. Throughout the workshop, students were exposed to many different examples of quilting technique from multiple eras and cultures, and encouraged to continue developing their skill as part of an ongoing practice of slow, mindful handcrafting.

“There's actually quite a really harmonious overlap between people who like to visualize information scientifically and people who like to pull together different colors and fabrics to tell a story. It's a really common blend of characteristics, and I thought MIT really attracts the kinds of students who would take off in this art form and take off with this craft.”

Jane didn’t have to wait long to find out if her hypothesis was correct. The results were incredible. “Our students are brilliant, they are precise, but they are also creative, and they consistently solve for really unexpected values. And you can see that in the individual quilts they made.”

Some of the IAP students have already used their new skill to design unique and personal new quilts. Alexandra Valdepeñas Ramirez, doubling in Mechanical Engineering and Cognitive Sciences, used a hand quilting technique called English Paper Piecing to create her second-ever quilt, a wall hanging of the newly discovered Einstein tile known as "the Hat". Valdepeñas made her own templates for the shape, which tessellates to cover a surface with no gaps in a pattern that never repeats. The blend of advanced mathematics and skilled handcrafting is bold, playful — and perfectly MIT.

Quilting and similar handcrafts have been traditionally practiced by women, and when people think about making at MIT, Jane believes, they tend to “think about 3D printers, they think about really high technological things — they think about welding, glass blowing, metalworking — and sometimes they don't think so much about the crafts that have historically been practiced by women.”

She continues, “I think it's really important to acknowledge that hands-on includes everybody, that everyone can participate in artwork and craftwork; that quilting, fabric, textiles are for everybody. And I think that it's really exciting to see people responding positively to something that is a little out of MIT's comfort zone, and that is still so perfect for us.”