Brave Patch

In 2020, I founded BravePatch.School, an online, conscious community for makers focused on becoming better improvisers through our quilting and in life.

While reading My Grandmother’s Hands by and How to Be an Anti Racist by Ibram X. Kendi, and having been introduced to the concept of Brave Space, I realized that the embodied practice of improvisational quilting was a path towards establishing a diverse quilting community where makers could become conscious of implicit racial bias and free ourselves of white body supremacy and practices —a place where makers could practice unlearning through making, through the craft of improvisational quilting.

Brave Patch Mission

Improv happens through relationships. The liberating practice of improv quilting has the potential of changing the way we show up in our creative lives and our interpersonal relationship, helping us become more flexible, authentic and responsive within our communities, and better able to navigate systems in flux. Besides the sun rising and setting there are few patterns in our lives anymore that are fixed.

The world is changing and we are changing the way we relate in the world through the way we make patterns in our quilts! It’s a brave new world and that’s why we started the Brave Patch Groove, a Brave Space for improv quilters. Brave Patch is a conscious community of quilters, dedicated to becoming better improvisers through our patchwork, and in our lives.

We honor and center the legacy of liberated quilting that has evolved through generations of black women in community, such as the Quilters of Gee’s Bend, and Rosie Lee Tompkins, Arbie Williams, Laverne Brackens, and countless unknown black makers of improvisational quilts throughout the generations. We know and affirm that their legacy has sparked a revolution in creative culture that continues to reverberate throughout the art, design, craft and quilting communities. Their remarkable quilts give witness to the freedom that comes from faith and trust in a higher power, and point the way to a liberated practice of quilting. We listen and discover new ways of relating from these makers and their quilts.

Following the lead of their powerful quilts, in becoming better improvisers, we practice letting go of perfectionism, a sense of urgency and defensiveness. We are focused on appreciative learning, realistic expectations, and facing our fear of the unknown with curiosity. We embrace differences and the new. We share the responsibility of learning. We employ “Yes And” thinking, and examine the privilege of comfort and our fear of the unknown, when we catch ourselves saying “yes but…”

We welcome the discomfort of our growing edge. We actively defund the “quilt police” from within when we hear their criticisms and efforts to control our agency to follow our joy. Instead we hold each other to greater truth and love, and harness that collective energy into our patchwork, by speaking what is true for each of us with acceptance and celebration. We examine our process and outcomes, without comparison and judgment, and take our learning, and this liberating practice out into the world because…