Ginny Robinson’s Award-Winning Quilt “School Supplies” Grapples With the Pervasive Threat of Gun Violence in American Schools

Story via Arshia Simkin, The Underline, the Orange County Arts Commission

Chapel Hill resident Ginny Robinson is a quiltmaker and a local middle school English teacher. In February 2024, she won QuiltCon’s most prestigious award—”Best in Show”—for her quilt titled “What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies,” which combines these two worlds in a sobering, statement-making quilt. QuiltCon is the world’s largest modern quilting event, attracting thousands of quilting aficionados; this past year, the event was held in Raleigh, where Robinson submitted her quilt.

The quilt “was inspired by my experience as a teacher and also sort of my emotional response to Uvalde,” Robinson said. The front of the award-winning quilt has a bright yellow background—“school bus yellow,” Robinson said—with black silhouettes of various school supplies arranged in a circular pattern: the school supplies include gallon jugs, keys, Erlenmeyer flasks, fire extinguishers, scissors, hammers, boots, books, school chairs, microscopes and more. The back of the quilt features a white background with a red silhouette of an assault rifle.

To get inspiration for what school supplies she wanted to include in the quilt, Robinson polled the Instagram followers on her quilt making Instagram page @minnowpeck, asking the teachers to tell her what school supplies they would use for self-defense in the event that their classroom was breached by an active shooter. Robinson got a wide variety of answers—geographically, grade-wise, and subject-wise. Robinson documented the process of creating the quilt on the Instagram page; on a September 6, 2023 post about the latest school supplies she was adding to the quilt, she wrote, “‘Cello cases’ and ‘more building blocks,’ because they make me the angriest. The objects are starting to get pushed out of the frame, and while I still hate this quilt in so many ways and find it so heavy on my mind and heart, I am starting to find it beautiful. All these objects that make up teachers’ days and lives.”

Unlike other quilts, “it’s not meant to be comforting,” Robinson said. “I made [this] quilt to be uncomfortable,” she said. Both because of its artful, arresting design and the devastating subject-matter that it grapples with, the response to “School Supplies” has been far-reaching. It “has been really, profoundly moving. I’ve had survivors of school shootings reach out to me. I’ve had parents of children who have died in school shootings reach out to me,” Robinson said. A post about the quilt on Robinson’s Instagram page is flooded with comments like the following from a user “matagopal”: “Your quilt immediately took my breath away and choked me with tears. I’m a mother, a teacher, and a human, (right down the road in Hillsborough) and it just so perfectly did what art does.” For Robinson, the most gratifying aspect of her win has been this emotional engagement that viewers have felt and the fact that it’s doing the work she set out for it to do: “I just been really honored by the way that people have reached out and the ways that they have felt seen by it,’ Robinson said.

Robinson first got into quilting about fifteen years ago, while living in Philadelphia; at the time her husband was doing his medical residency and her first daughter had just been born. It was the dead of winter in Philadelphia and, looking for something to occupy her time, Robinson requested a sewing machine for her birthday. “I hadn’t yet found another teaching job and so I was very bored and very lonely and I needed something to do,” Robinson said. She noted that motherhood can be a time when everything feels tenuous; thus, she was drawn to the grounding, tangible nature of quilt making: “I think early motherhood is a really difficult time for a lot of people and it certainly was for me and I just needed something where–if I made a project—it wasn’t going to come undone,” she said.

For Robinson, the thinking phase of quilt making takes a long time: “I tend to roll an idea around in my head for a while before I execute,” she said. This is Robinson’s typical modus operandi: she noted that she is also a writer, with a graduate degree in creative writing, and she similarly has a “long incubation period” when it comes to writing.

Robinson said that she works on her quilt making when she can find the time and, as a teacher with a full-time job, that’s not always easy: for example, “School Supplies” took her a year and a half to finish.

Recently, “School Supplies” and another quilt of Robinson’s called “New Lovers’ Knot” were both acquired by the International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska, which Robinson called “an honor.”

Learn more about Ginny Robinson’s quilt making on Instagram @minnowpeck and on her website minnowpeck.com

(story + images via Orange County Arts Commission)

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