Inspired by quilts like the NAMES project AIDS memorial quilt, I wanted to created a quilt that captured the feelings of Minnesotans in response to the ICE occupation of our city. I also wanted to offer people a tangible object they could create to combat the feeling of helplessness felt by many as our federal government waged war on our city. This project is on going and will be completed over the next couple of months communally through quilting bee style meetings to assemble the quilt top and quilt the whole piece together.The process of reaching out to the community and having people turn in their quilts was quite quick, people had about 3 weeks to make their squares. This was intentional to name the emergency of the ICE occupation. The assembly of this quilt will take longer, intentionally. I hope this serves as a place for quilters and sewers to get to know each other and process what has happened and continues to happen in our city. Quilting bees have been used this way, to process grief and gather community strength for many generations.

This quilt was made to honor the marriage of our two dear friends. Ethan and I have quilted side by side for many years and wanted to finally make a piece together. We worked on it for about 10 months leading up to the wedding. In the final steps of the quiltmaking process, securing the binding to the edge of the quilt, we invited many friends of the couple to contribute a stitch or two, hoping the love of the couples whole community could be felt in the stitches.The pattern we chose is a double wedding ring, a centuries old motif, found in architecture, textiles, and pottery representing an eternal bond and harmonious marriage. The variety of fabrics coming together to create a cohesive pattern represents the many different parts of our friends lives joining in union. We hope this quilt can serve as a joyful reminder of our love for our friends, their love for each other and can accompany them through their lifelong adventures.More work of Ethan's can be seen on his instagram @artvcraft

About Me

Annabel Higgin-Houser is a Minneapolis Based textile artist and quiltmaker. Her quilts have been exhibited in Gordon Parks Gallery at Metropolitan State University, along with City Block Quilt Shop in Minneapolis. Higgin-Houser works out of her home studio in Minneapolis and at libraries around the Twin Cities with her quilting community.

Artist Statemet
My practice incorporates dreamy scenes of a hopeful future through quilting, applique and crochet. My work is influenced by the Quaker Quilting community of eastern Iowa, who taught me to quilt and my mother, aunts and grandmother who instilled in me a reverence for handmade textiles.I use mostly second hand fabrics and yarn. Many quilt guilds I am a part of have a tradition of sharing the fabric stash of members who have died. So much of the fabric I use now once belonged to someone else and might be a part of a quilt that belongs to someone very far away from me. I love that this lineage of quilters is visible in each piece I make. I also purchase fabrics through second hand craft markets and local quilting businesses. In every part of my quilting and fiber practice I aim to support the world I dream about living in. One where resources are shared freely, where local craft communities are thriving.I use my quilts as a place to dream of a world without capitalism, where waste is reused and reimagined, instead of thrown in a landfill. A world where we solved the climate crisis, we figured out a way to live in harmony with the natural world around us and in harmony with other humans. To achieve this harmony so many of the systems that exist today need to fall and new systems need to be built to replace them. We need systems centered around humans and the planet thriving rather than profit. I aim to imagine some parts of this world in my quilts.When I am making a story quilt the story reveals itself to me as I put together each layer. The background piecing offers a base onto which I applique aspects of the world I dream about living in. In the final step where I sew over the whole piece, this is the actual act of “quilting” , I feel as if I am solidifying the dream I have created in the quilt.I find the slow process of quilting meditative and a time in which I can reflect on my dreams and hopes for myself and my community and then practice living in the world I want to exist. Quilting is meticulous and takes many steps of planning, cutting, sewing, ironing. Moving at this pace is antithetical to the fast paced capitalist world we live in. Similarly, quilting takes me out of the “mode” of being a consumer, to being a producer. Taking part and creating quilting communities adds another layer of connection to the work I make. I can share my dreams for the future with these groups and hear their dreams as well. I hope to inspire viewers to imagine what they would like our future to look like and what small ways they could help us get closer to that world.

Contact Me
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In this quilt I explore a possible dream of the future of Minneapolis in 5 generations.I sewed together the background of the quilt and created applique pieces to illustrate the future I imagine along with identifiable locations in Minneapolis. Each element is ironed and stitched in place. I quilted the piece together using a whimsical swirl pattern to emphasize the dream-like quality of the image.With the strong grip of fascism around our throats, dreaming can feel pointless. But generations of activists show us that in order to create a better future we have to imagine it. I used this quilt to do that. In it you will see I-35 replaced by a high speed rail system,f ree buses and people get around by foot. There is a farm that provides all of the food for the neighborhood. Everyone has what they need, shelter, food, community, healthcare, quality education. Equally important to what is in the quilt, is what is not included in the quilt. In this future there are no prisons, no military industrial complex, no single occupant vehicles. I invite the viewer to take this as an invitation to dream. If all of your wildest dreams for our city could come true, what would that look like?

The practices of quiltmaking and fiber arts offer a new way to move through time. Each time I pick up a project I find myself slowing down and connecting to the headspace/ temporal landscape that I was in the last time I worked on it. Projects often take years to complete, each time you revisit a piece you are connecting to the version of yourself that started the piece. Finished pieces exist long after the maker has passed away. The fiber arts we make today will be used by future people to make sense of our current moment.This feeling is something I explore in my piece Nice to See You. I created this piece after going to a lecture on Religious Time. In that lecture a rabbi explained that many people feel when they participate in a ritual they are connecting to every moment in history where one of their ancestors completed that ritual. As they begin their ritual they invite their ancestors to join them in that moment and they can all exist in the same time together. In this piece I aim to illustrate that feeling. The act of performing a ritual is the two hands reaching out to each other, then as the ritual continues it feels as if their ancestors are right there beside you. Then as soon as the ritual is finished you return to the present moment and your ancestor returns to their moment in time. I feel this feeling as I participate in activist work. Generations of people have done the same tasks as me, door knocking, hosting community meals, participating in quilting bees. As we performs these rituals of social progress, all of these who have done so before us are right there next to us, watching as we continue to march towards a better future.

This quilt was the first quilt I started many years ago, completing it finally in 2025. I made it for my niece to celebrate her 10th birthday. This is a very traditional quilt in that it was made to celebrate an important moment in the life of a family member. My niece is a bright whimsical kid and I wanted to capture that in the design of this quilt. I used the Star Poppy quilt pattern by Emily Dennis. The fabrics are a mix of second hand and new cottons.

This quilt was made as an improvisational project in an afternoon, unlike most of my work. I wanted to capture the feeling of queer joy and name that while the grip of fascism may be tight around our necks, our joy and celebration of our own lives will not be stopped. Dancing in a queer club on the weekend is just the release one needs after fighting in the street all week.

This quilt was made to celebrate my dear friend Makennah and now husband Tre, but mostly Makennah.In 2023 she graduated law school, passed the bar exam and got engaged. I wanted to honor such a momentous year in her life. The color scheme of this quilt was inspired by a decoration she has on her wall, a real Raintbow Trout her now husband caught. These colors are repeated throughout their home so it felt fitting. This was the first quilt I created where I didn't follow a written pattern, though the motif, Irish Chain, is one of the most popular quilt patterns and is very simple to make.

I created this quilted book in the fall of 2023 after the genocide in Gaza ramped up. I felt so helpless watching my tax dollars support the violent destruction of a whole population. I found myself thinking, what is it going to take for things to change? For the violent grip of imperialism to loosen and end?I was also interested in exploring the different forms a quilt can take. How does the form of a book transform all of the meaning associated with a larger quilt? Quilted books are often associate with infants and very young children, how could a book that takes the shape of something we all experienced as children, convey a message to adults? This was partly an exploration into a dream of mine of creating a childrens book written for adults, giving adults an avenue to speak directly to their inner child.All of the fabric used for this book was second hand from the Sunshine Circle Quilting group. The quilting was done by machine and the embroidery was done by hand.