Lily Dillon walked into the Codman Square Branch Library several months ago looking to rent the community room for her baby shower. She walked out as the newest, and youngest, member of a long-established quilting circle.

“I never expected this at all,” said Dillon during last Tuesday’s annual Codman Quilters Showcase, a standing-room-only event at the library branch on Washington Street. “I never thought I would do anything like this, but it’s been so much fun.”

While the library doesn’t rent out the room, Dillon was intrigued by the large sewing group that she encountered there on that day months ago, socializing and having fun. She recalls thinking, “What is all of this?”

It was a session of the Codman Square Senior Quilters, a group of women who meet at the library twice a week from September to June. And they welcomed the young mother-to-be into the circle, eager to teach her how to make her own quilt.

Quilter Angela Deriggs stands in front of the quilt she made this year with the group.

“Honestly, it was pregnancy and staying home all the time and looking for friends,” Dillon said last Tuesday. “Really, I was looking for community and they took me in and loved on me. I didn’t even know it was for seniors until recently.”

This spring, she and her newborn son, Silas Evergreen Dillon, continued to attend and work on quilts. Dillon finished her first baby quilt that she started while she was pregnant with Silas.

“He’s been part of it, too, as much as I have been,” she said.

Elnora Thompson, a long-time quilter, and Keith Meredith.

For long-time quilters, such as Elnora Thompson, absorbing Dillon into the group, which years ago gathered at the Kit Clark Senior Center in Fields Corner, is just how they do things, she said, laughing it off in the sense that being welcoming to everyone is part of the group’s mission.
People find them, and they stick with them. So many years ago, Thompson was looking for a social group and a pastime after retiring from the phone company and found it with the quilters.

She has become a very accomplished quilter, with dozens and dozens of pieces to her name.

Donna Meredith is another example, a newbie to the group in 2023 who made her first quilt over that winter. Now, she has created numerous pieces and tapped into her own artistic style.

“She has come a long way, a really long way,” said her adult daughters who were in attendance last week.

Library Branch Manager Janice Knight emceed the event on Tuesday and surprised the group with the announcement that 12 new sewing machines had been purchased for them by the Boston Public Library (BPL). They will be put to use next fall when the group re-convenes.

A special guest for the showcase was Susan Thompson (no relation to Elnora), who is a professional quilting artist in Northeastern University’s African American Master Artists-in-Residency program. An instructor in the Codman quilting program, she brought several examples of her artwork, which she distinguished from that of functional quilting work, which is meant to be used.

Art Quilter Susan Thompson was the special guest during the Codman Quilters Showcase last week.

Many of her works have been displayed in museum spaces. Her mentor was the late South End painter Allan Rohan Crite, so her work often references his notable street scenes. One of her pieces, a horse quilt, hung in a government building in Senegal for two years.

Thompson said her grandmother used to watch her while her parents worked, and during those times taught her to quilt in a q circle with other women.

Coming full circle to Dillon, she, too, settled in with a group of older women to learn that same art form, and, as a bonus, get pointers on raising her new baby and other lessons from experience. Quilting, many in the Codman group agreed, it is a cross-generational experience and something to be taught and handed down.

And that baby shower in the community room that Dillon was hoping for? It took place, though not with the friends and family she had intended to invite. Instead, it was with the ladies from the quilting circle – her newfound friends and community.

“They came together and surprised me,” Dillon said. “I didn’t know they were doing it, but I came in one day and there was all this food, and we had a baby shower.”

As to the quilters, they just said that the shower was just an example of how things are done in Dorchester.