Stitched Stories was built to put that inheritance directly into young people’s hands. Developed by Tiffeni Fontno, Education Librarian and ABC Quilters — a community-based organization that preserves quilting as an educational tool and links it to STEM, history, and storytelling — the program pairs picture books with needle and thread. Students read, discuss, design, and sew. The book sets the creative intention; the fabric carries it forward.
The ALA Annual Conference panel brought four perspectives: Casandra L. Allen, Betty Turner, and Alyssa Leonard, all quilters and educators, and Tiffeni Fontno, educator and literacy advocate. Their shared framework is what they describe as an African American Elder Womanist approach — knowledge passed down, hand to hand, generation to generation.
The Pilot
The pilot ran at Ida B. Wells Elementary School in Nashville, Tennessee, with six students, eight sewing machines, and six weeks.
Week one covered tools, safety, and straight-line practice. In week two, students joined their first fabric pairs, made pouches and pillows, stitched their own names, and met the first book. Week three introduced fabric choice, seam alignment, and the meaning of quilt block symbols. By week four, students were sewing rows together and laying out blocks on a design wall. Week five brought in the community quilt — individual work joining into something collective. Week six was final assembly: the quilt sandwich, batting and backing, straight-line quilting, and a label.
The Books
Four titles anchored the sessions:
- The All-Together Quilt by Lizzy Rockwell
- I Am Enough by Grace Byers, illustrated by Keturah A. Bobo
- The Patchwork Path: A Quilt Map to Freedom by Bettye Stroud, illustrated by Erin Susanne Bennett
- Charles and His Gee’s Bend Quilt by Tangular A. Irby, illustrated by India Sheana
Librarian, Tiffeni Fontno, provided the read-alouds, which opened into a discussion, and each discussion into a design decision. After reading I Am Enough, students made a block bearing their name and a positive image. Charles and His Gee’s Bend Quilt brought the Gee’s Bend quilters of Alabama into the room, and their improvisational geometry into the students’ layouts.
