Activity | Covenant Quilt

Unitarian Universalist Covenant Quilts help participants consider how they hope to covenant with the community. An entire congregation, small group, class, or family can create them.

While UU Covenant Quilts can be pieced together at any time, it works well to make the quilt around the observance of Mending at the start of the congregational year.

Participant Squares

• Each participant fills in a UU Covenant Quilt Square worksheet pictured here (download PDF)

• In each yellow and orange triangle, they write a few qualities or values they will commit to bringing to the congregation or group this year.

  
  

• In each green, blue, and purple triangle, they write some qualities or values they hope to receive from the congregation or group this year.

  
  

• In the center square, they write their name(s).

•  After completing the worksheet, each person (or a coordinator) cuts out the square and assembles it with other squares to create a quilt.

Assembling the Quilt

You may wish to add 'emphasis squares,' such as the congregation's logo or slogan, hearts, or shapes.

There are many ways to construct the quilt. If you're lucky enough to have a quilting bee, perhaps you can ask for their help to create a fabric quilt. For a larger group, I find it easy to use poster putty to hang the paper squares in a tight grid on a wall, take a photo of the quilt hanging, crop it, and send it to a photo printer. 

In this example, members wrote values on yellow, pink, blue, and green sticky notes, which were then digitized and used to make a quilt graphic. That file was uploaded to Shutterfly and printed as a blanket.

Another example was made from paper triangles pasted to household squares.