The WasteShed’s first Re-Thread Quilting Bee burst onto the seam last year (😉) and as we look ahead towards dusting off the quilting frames for round 2, we (aka Emily and Laura, WS Program Directors) wanted to post a recap of what ended up being a really fun and generative event!

Shoutout ahead of time to our coworker Hannah for providing many of the beautiful photographs included throughout!

The Beginning:

The idea for doing a quilting bee started out as the best kind of clandestine, real-time collaboration that actually happens quite frequently at The WasteShed! Laura and I were looking at the calendar and really wanted to put together some sort of community effort for The WasteShed that would raise resources and get the community involved, similar to DiscardDiscos of the past. Around the same time, Laura also happened to have begun chatting about doing some potential shenanigans with Chicago store regular Daliah Silver, the lead organizer of Chicago Textile Center, a community resource project for textile craft in the city!

CTC is doing some really cool stuff, including an annual textile fair, and you should learn more about what they’re doing here: CTC Website

In addition to all of this, we also simply needed help finding homes for all of the textile waste that The WasteShed gets donated on a regular basis! If you have tried to donate fabric at either of our locations, you know that we typically ask to make sure that your textile donation is at LEAST a half yard in length. This is because we have too many fabric scraps! I swear they multiply at night. We try all sorts of things to find new homes for scraps: sell them for cheap, put them in the free pile, make scrap bundles, put them in in-kind donations, but they always worm their way back into our fabric bins. And when the scraps get small and plentiful enough, there’s only one thing left to do! Put them in a darn quilt of course.

We’re not sure if it was Daliah, Emily, or Laura who was the first to bring up the bee, but once the idea was planted, it quickly took root! Re-Thread @ The Shed was born!

Fabric bundles ft. educational quilting zines by Chicago Textile Center and extremely cute Bee tickets designed by our social media intern, Nazari!

The Re-Thread Bee
We conceived of two main phases for The Bee so that folks could participate in both the quilt making and sewing bee depending on their interests.

Step 1.
Everybody loves a mystery bundle. This is a fact of life. One learns this very quickly when working or volunteering at The WasteShed (our mystery egg sales are proof!). With the help of volunteers, we put together dozens of semi-mysterious (fully whimsical) scrap pack bundles, which participants could then make into a quiltblock to submit to the community quilt. The bundles also included a cutie quilt zine by Daliah at CTC, as well as a ticket to the quilting bee itself in November. Folks could also buy a ticket to the quilting bee only — making a quilt square wasn’t mandatory (but blocks of all levels and vibes were welcome!)

The sales generated from tickets went to supporting the WasteShed and allowing us to compensate CTC for their many efforts on this project!

Step 2.
We were immediately blown away by how many people were interested in making quilt squares! Then, as the season rolled along, we were even more amazed (and delighted!) by how incredible and wonderful everyones’ blocks turned out.

1 of 2 twin sized quilt tops that Daliah assembled from community blocks!

I mean, come on! Look how fun these are. We were able to make 2 roughly twin-sized tops out of everyones’ blocks and they’re both such delights. They’re incredibly whimsical and scrappy, but still very cohesive thanks to Daliah’s magic quilt assemblage skills.

Step 3 — The Bee

November 16th was the day of the Bee, but first we had to prepare the space. The classroom at Humboldt is a bit of a workhorse and gets used for all sorts of things — workshops, lunches, volunteering, storage, etc. We sold the absolute maximum amount of tickets that we could for the amount of space we had, which meant that the stakes were particularly high for getting the classroom looking clean and welcoming for all the quilters who would be joining us!

A huge shoutout is owed to WS staff members Laura, Earl, and the rest of the team for making the space look so inviting and festive ahead of the Re-Thread Bee!

A cozy corner for making paper quilts that we set up before The Bee

We really wanted to make sure that folks got enough bang for their buck during the event, so we set up a handful of extra activities around the room for folks to do in addition to quilting at the frame. These included:

- Collaging paper quilts (s/o collager extraordinaire Susan for holding it down at this station!)
-Vintage quilt photo booth
-Snacks and refreshments
-Signature embroidery station for signing the back of the quilt (thank you Earl!)
-A silent auction ft. a number of baskets donated by local businesses and artists!

Emily, Daliah, and Laura at the photo booth :)

For the main event, the quilters rotated around two handmade quilting frames provided by CTC. Daliah kicked things off by walking folks through the process of hand quilting at the frame using a handmade fan pattern that she assembled before the event! It worked really well and was a great balance between learning a new skill and being able to jump right in with the process.

It was so special to see everyone collaboratively working on a beautiful piece of textile art all in support of making creativity more accessible to folks via The WasteShed and Chicago Textile Center’s work. Collective artmaking is beautiful and ephemeral and hard to write about, so please enjoy these photos our coworker Hannah took on the day!

Finally, we want to give a shoutout our sponsors for the event as well! We owe a huge thank you to Seam Studios for sponsoring the Re-Thread Bee and Las Mujeres Farm and Winery for providing drinks!

This was our first year experimenting with a quilting bee program and we were blown away by the creativity and enthusiasm folks had for it. We learned a lot about how to run a bee (like how to streamline our chair game so more folks can fit at the frame!) but at the end of the day we’re proud of what we made together and look forward to maybe doing it again sometime 👀

What happened to the quilts?

Well, after the Re-Thread Bee, they began their world tour as a site of continued quilt education with the CTC. In December, Daliah organized the Chicago Textile Center’s inaugural Textile Fair, an awesome event that brought together vendors, artists, demonstrators, and textile folk from around the area for a day of learning and engaging. Daliah brought the WS quilts along and folks continued to work on them throughout the fair and at several other quilt events in the intervening months. As of writing, there are still a few finishing touches to go up on the quilts, but once they’re finished the WasteShed plans to hang each of the quilts at our two creative reuse centers in Humboldt Park and Evanston.

One of the Quilts at the CTC Textile Fair

What’s Next for The Bee?

We are happy to announce that due to the success of 2025’s Re-Thread Bee, The WasteShed will be running this project again in the summer of 2026!! We learned so much this past year and are excited to scale things up a bit and bring more people into the sewing circle.

What to Expect from Year 2:
-More blockmaking with additional resources and options for folks’ submissions
-Alternative ways to participate including workshop collaborations with partner organizations local to Chicago’s West Side neighborhoods
-More participants and a bigger quilt!
-Additional sponsors and happenings at the quilting bee event
-Open studio nights to make blocks together
-The most exciting part: A new location for the quilting bee with more room for folks to spread out and join in!

Quilting Bees have long been used as a mutual aid and resource sharing strategy by makers throughout history. The re-thread bee is a modern take on this lovely tradition and highlights the way that crafting, sharing, and reusing things together aren’t just abstract, platitudinous ideals, but vital practices that benefit the collective!

If you are interested in sponsoring or getting involved, please email programs@thewasteshed.com or donate directly here.

***We are looking for Spanish language instructors! If you or someone you know is interested in teaching sewing/quilting workshops in Spanish and English, please reach out!***

Re-Thread Re-Cap: A WasteShed Community Quilting Bee ft. CTC

In Memoriam: Rebuilding Exchange, 2009 - 2025