The following guest post is by Molly-Claire Gillett. In addition to her participation in the Simcoe Area Women’s Institute Centennial Quilt Project, Molly-Claire captured the quilt’s creation in photographs, written reflections, and recorded stories shared by members of the Women’s Institutes. This record of the project will be donated to the Simcoe County Archives, where it will help preserve this history for future generations.
Introduction
The Simcoe Area Women’s Institutes (WI) have a long history of gathering to knit, crochet, sew, quilt, and make practical and beautiful objects for home, community, and country. Their Tweedsmuir Community History Books, along with other WI records preserved at the Simcoe County Archives, document more than a century of craft skill, local memory, and women’s leadership. In their pages, members taught sewing, took classes in hat and glove making, created commemorative quilts, sold handmade goods through tourist rooms, and knit socks and warm garments for soldiers overseas. These activities were never simply hobbies. They were ways of sharing knowledge, supporting neighbours, responding to national events, and preserving women’s experiences in rural communities. In 2025 and 2026, the Simcoe Area WI marked the centennial of its founding with a project rooted in that same tradition: a quilt made collectively to honour rural women’s stories, friendship, and shared history.
Craft as a Community Practice
From September 2024 to August 2026, I was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Irish Studies at the University of Galway and the Trent Centre for Aging and Society. My project examined the craft work of two historically rural women’s organizations: the Women’s Institutes, founded in Ontario in 1897, and the Irish Countrywomen’s Association, founded in Ireland in 1910. Both organizations began by supporting education and practical skills for rural women and continue today through advocacy, community service, and friendship. Early in my research, I visited Crown Hill WI to learn about local craft history. When Peggy Pratt, Crown Hill WI member and ROSE (Rural Ontario Sharing Education) coordinator for the Simcoe Area Women’s Institutes, invited me to host a craft workshop at the organization’s 2025 Women’s Day event, quilting immediately came to mind. Crown Hill members had emphasized the area’s quilting traditions, which were also well represented in their Tweedsmuir Histories. The timing was ideal: the Simcoe Area WI was approaching its centennial, having been founded in 1925 and holding its first Area Convention in 1926.
The Project
WI members have often turned to quilts to commemorate milestones. In 1967, branches celebrated Canada’s centennial with handmade projects, and Home and Country noted that quilts and rugs telling local histories were favourites. In 1978, members of the North and South Simcoe Districts collaborated on two signature quilts embroidered with approximately 1,300 names (fig. 1). In 1984, Simcoe Area members also contributed to a quilt marking the bicentennial of the arrival of United Empire Loyalists in Ontario, which was presented to Queen Elizabeth at the Agricultural Picnic. These examples showed how quilts could preserve names, places, and moments in community history.
With this history in mind, Peggy and I planned the first stage of what became the Simcoe Area Women’s Institutes Centennial Quilt. At Women’s Day, we displayed antique and vintage quilts from members’ personal collections and from the Coldwater Canadiana Museum. Signature quilts sparked conversation as members recognized local family names and considered how a quilt could hold a community together across generations. A crazy quilt invited close reading of fabrics, embroidery, and reused dressmaking scraps. Visitors noticed texture, colour, thread, and signs of wear, discussing what the materials might reveal about the makers’ skills, choices, and available resources. The quilts became records in cloth, revealing social connections, domestic labour, creativity, and everyday lives.
The process
Each attendee received an embroidery hoop and thread (fig. 2) and, after a brief tutorial, embroidered a name or initials on a square. Some participants stitched confidently; others noted how many years had passed since they had last sewn by hand. Several chose to write their names in pencil for Peggy and me to embroider later, while others added flowers or decorative motifs.
After the event, news of the project spread. Peggy received additional submissions and eventually placed a tin on her doorstep so members could pick up embroidery supplies and drop off finished signature squares (fig. 3). Ruth Fountain, a longtime Hawkstone WI member, embroidered all the names for her branch before passing away shortly afterward, making her contribution especially meaningful.
Clowes WI member and longtime quilter Lynn Fisher joined the team as submissions arrived. Using fabric purchased with WI funding, donated by members, and drawn from our own stashes, we created a patchwork block for each signature in the WI colours of yellow and blue (fig. 4).
Lynn and Peggy decided that the quilt should be constructed using the “quilt as you go” method. Instead of gathering around a large frame, as WI members often did at quilting bees in the past, each participant could quilt an individual square or section by hand. The patchworked front, batting, and backing were joined first, and the finished blocks would later be sewn together with sashing. The method made the quilting bees portable and less intimidating for those who had not quilted recently. It also allowed every square to carry the mark of its maker.
The Quilt as a community record
By this point, my research had come to focus on Simcoe County’s Tweedsmuir Histories, and we began to think of the quilt as a kind of stitched Tweedsmuir: a record of a particular moment in WI history. Tweedsmuir books often combine minutes, photographs, newspaper clippings, biographies, recipes, maps, and local histories. They are collaborative, layered, and deeply tied to place. The Centennial Quilt seemed to work in a similar way. Each block recorded a name, a branch, a hand, and a moment of participation. The makers of the 1978 signature quilt had described their project as something for “other generations to admire and remember” and as “one way the WI strives to preserve past for future.” Inspired by that idea, we decided to collect recorded stories alongside the stitched ones so they could be preserved with the quilt.
Bringing it all together
Between November 2025 and June 2026, we held Quilting and History Bees at Tec-We-Gwil WI Hall in Newton Robinson, Scott Davidson MP’s office in a historic Bradford house, Edgar Hall, and the Elmvale Heritage Park Pavilion. Members of Tec-We-Gwil, Eady Grenard, Bond Head, Craighurst, Clowes, Centre Flos, Crown Hill, and Wyebridge WI attended, along with friends and neighbours—more than fifty quilters in total. Peggy opened each bee with a story meant to comfort perfectionists: as a young woman, she had quilted with her soon-to-be mother-in-law, only to return and find her stitches removed. Perfection, she reminded us, was not the goal. Instead, the quilt would reflect the reality of community work: many names, fabrics, hands, and techniques, sometimes uneven, but meaningful together. As participants quilted, I invited members to share stories about their branches’ histories and present-day activities, recording them for preservation at the Simcoe County Archives (figs. 5 and 6).
The stories shared at the bees highlighted deep continuities and changes in rural life. Some branches had already passed their centennial years: Wyebridge was founded in 1901, and Bond Head in 1902. Members recalled the support WI offered young mothers when rural communities were more isolated, strong women who founded and led branches, and skills passed through families and neighbours. Present-day activities often echoed earlier WI work. Branches described historical research on the Penetanguishene Road, advocacy for road safety, community lunches, coffee gatherings, and fundraising for local causes. At Crown Hill’s bee in Edgar Hall, Tweedsmuir Coordinators Bernice Hickling and Laurel Chappell displayed histories and scrapbooks containing quilt patterns, tutorials, past projects, and photographs of local quilter Viola Tuck (figs. 7 and 8). Peggy had learned quilting techniques from Viola as a young woman, making that connection part of the Centennial Quilt’s story too.
The squares themselves also tell stories. The embroidered signatures and quilting stitches show different levels of skill, confidence, and interest in sewing, reflecting changes in women’s experiences over time. Some members remembered sewing as an obligation learned at school or done for family need, while others had come to enjoy quilting and embroidery as leisure, creativity, or companionship. Some stitches are careful and even; others are experimental or hurried. Together, they show that the point of the project was not technical perfection but participation. In this way, the quilt records both continuity and change: old skills being remembered, new skills being learned, and community knowledge being passed from one person to another.
As the Quilting and History Bees concluded, quilter and Craighurst WI member Marg Patterson joined the committee and machine-embroidered a central panel with the Simcoe Area’s centennial dates (fig. 9). Peggy hand-embroidered the names of each represented branch (fig. 10), while I embroidered the WI logo and a recognition of the committee (fig. 11). Gen Moisan of the Textiles and Materiality Cluster at Concordia University embroidered a QR code linking viewers to the Simcoe County Archives’ interactive map of Simcoe Area WI branches and related holdings (fig. 18). With 129 squares completed, the quilt was ready for assembly.
The Centennial Quilt Committee met over five days at Dalston United Church and Edgar Hall to assemble the quilt. We arranged the blocks by branch in alphabetical order (fig. 12), sewed them together in sections (fig. 13), and used leftover blue and yellow fabric to create sashing and borders (figs. 14 and 15).
On two occasions, Simcoe Area President Donna Jebb joined us, bringing the number of sewing machines to five. The work was lively, noisy, and sometimes difficult as layers of fabric piled up and blocks varied more in size than expected. Like the quilted blocks themselves, the final design was made “as you go,” through problem-solving, compromise, and a willingness to embrace irregularity. We began to think of it as a “scrappy signature quilt”—perhaps inventing a new category altogether.
This process of making do and reimagining older techniques is part of the quilt’s meaning. How might past WI craftswomen, such as Viola Tuck or the members who created blocks for royal presentation, have used the same materials differently? Our quilt reflects collaboration among makers with varied skills and experiences, as well as changing quilting trends and technologies. Lynn even used ChatGPT for quilting advice, calculations, tutorials, and advertising posters. Each committee member learned something new, and Peggy described the project as “an incredible educational experience, full of friendship, fellowship and fun.”
The Quilt
The quilt was completed in August 2026, more than a year after the project began. With its border and binding, it measures 79 1/2 inches wide by 103 inches long and hangs about ten inches over both sides of a queen-sized bed. On August 28, 2026, Peggy Pratt, Lynn Fisher, and Marg Patterson delivered it to the Simcoe County Museum, where it will be displayed during the Simcoe County Quilt, Rug, and Artisan Fair from September 18 to 20, 2026, and celebrated at an unveiling event on September 24, 2026, at 2 p.m. Like the Tweedsmuir Histories that inspired it, the Simcoe Area Women’s Institutes Centennial Quilt preserves names, places, techniques, and stories for future generations. It is a record of a centennial, but also of the everyday work through which WI members have long built and sustained community.
