African Fabric Quilting Community: Summit Milestones Reflection

Seven years ago, I committed to running a summit in the middle of a global pandemic.

I want to say that again slowly, because I sometimes forget how strange it sounds: I committed to launching the Quilt Africa International Summit in February 2020. Within weeks, the world had shut down. There was no template for what I was doing. There was no community of online quilting summits I could model mine on. There was just a Nigerian architect in Abuja, her own savings, a lot of power outages, and a belief that quilters across the world were ready to gather around African fabrics.

Eleven speakers. Attendees from countries I had never visited. A community that showed up from the very first session.

That was July 2020. This is July 2026. The seventh summit. And I am sitting here trying to find the right words for what these years have actually been.

What has been built

The African fabric quilting community that surrounds the summit is not what I imagined when I started. I imagined something smaller — more contained, more predictable. What grew instead was this: quilters from the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and places in between, gathered around a shared love of African textiles and a genuine hunger for the cultural depth those textiles carry.

The summit has always been the centrepiece — three days a year when the whole community is in one room, when a speaker from Chile is teaching curves in the same session that a quilter from Melbourne is learning about Adinkra symbols. These connections are not accidental. They are what the summit was built for.

But between summits, the community has continued. The Block of the Month has run every month since May 2020. The Facebook group has grown. The conversations have deepened. The quilts have gotten more ambitious, more culturally aware, more personal.

I am proud of that. I want to say it plainly.

What the hard years taught me

I will not pretend that every year has been straightforward. Some years I barely made it through the summit season. Some years the difficulty at home was enormous and I leaned on this community more than I probably let on. 2023 was one of the hardest years of my life, and the summit that July happened anyway — because Jeri Cook was there, because the community was there, because some things carry you even when you cannot carry yourself.

What I have learned across these seven years is something I try to pass on to every quilter who is building something:

The thing you are building will become part of you. In the early years, Quilt Africa felt like something I was running. Something external to me. I had to keep showing up for it. By 2024 I started to understand that it had stopped being separate — it was simply what I was. The community, the mission, the fabric, the stories. All of it.

That is not something you can plan for. It grows on its own timeline.

What I am looking forward to

The 2026 summit theme — Curating Your Body of Work — is the one I am most personally connected to. After seven years of building this community, I am in a season where I am thinking deeply about legacy: what we leave behind, what we choose to carry forward, what gets passed on.

The speakers this year reflect that. Tangular Irby, who is descended from the Gee's Bend quilters and has written a book for children about that legacy. Carol Wilson Spigner, who has built an institution around African American quilting culture in Harrisburg. Judie Pokakaa, who teaches the BOM every month with the kind of patience and craft that only a true educator has.

These are people who are curating their own bodies of work — and they are coming to help you curate yours.

For everyone who has been here from the beginning

If you were in the first summit in 2020 — thank you. If you joined the first BOM cohort in May of that year — you are part of a founding story that I will be honouring properly in 2027 when we reach the ten-year mark. I have not forgotten you. I am saving that milestone for the moment it deserves.

For now: thank you for the seven years. Thank you for the quilts you have made, the blocks you have shared, the friends you have brought into this community. Thank you for believing that an African fabric quilting community built from Abuja, Nigeria could be something worth gathering around.

The 2026 Quilt Africa International Summit is July 8, 9, and 10. Three days. Quilters from across the world. African fabric, cultural story, and the community you have been looking for.

Get your summit ticket →https://summit.quiltafricafabrics.com/2026-join-us

Early bird pricing closes June 24. After that, tickets are $75. Either way — come.