I am working on an article about the Canadian 1960’s quilt revival. While researching primary sources last week, I came across a 1966 article about a quilting group that was celebrating their 50th anniversary. Yes, that’s correct – the first meeting of the Brandon Hills (Manitoba) Busy Bees was in 1916! This group formed during the First World War to knit for the war effort. They continued to gather between the wars, through the Second World War, and forward. The last article I found about them celebrates their 60th anniversary, with three of the original members still in attendance. What a wealth of information they could have shared with us. What stories they could tell. What lives they lived and change they experienced, born in the late 1800’s.
And look, Doris Marston in Leicester, UK, who wrote ‘Patchwork Today’ and ‘Vintage Patchwork Made Perfect’, wrote to the Busy Bees in 1967. And perhaps another group from the UK wrote that “They received many of the Busy Bee quilts during the two world wars”. Did the Busy Bees have their own label or is the group in the UK referring to Canadian wartime quilts in general? We will likely never know.
I have attached the articles I have found from the ‘The Brandon Sun’ in the order in which they appeared. If anyone knows more about this group, the women who founded it and were members, or has a copy of the 60th Anniversary Presentation Booklet mentioned in the last article on this page, I would love to hear from you. And I don’t have any copies of Doris Marston’s books – if you do and wouldn’t mind taking a look, I would love to know if she mentioned the Brandon Busy Bees!
