Canada Post celebrates quilt-making with two historic Royal Ontario Museum quilts

Canada Post issued two quilt-themed stamps on 10 September 2026 celebrating quilt-making as both a practical craft and a record of personal and collective history. The stamp designs reproduce two works in the Royal Ontario Museum’s permanent collection: Northern Night, a 1956 quilt designed by Ada Bruce Torrance and sewn by members of the Simcoe County Arts and Crafts Association, and a circa-1890s log cabin quilt created by Frederica Matilda Tompkins of East Florenceville, New Brunswick.

Northern Night uses the aurora borealis, Big Dipper, North Star and a loon in its composition and won the grand prize in a Star Weekly quilt contest. Tompkins’s cotton-and-wool quilt uses a barn-raising log cabin pattern. Canada Post extended the museum connection to the supporting products: the booklet cover depicts Catharine Gage Pettit’s 1865 Wreath of Flowers quilt, while the Official First Day Cover uses a circa-1840–50 patchwork quilt associated with the Lingham family of Belleville, Ontario.

Shelby Guergis designed the issue using photographs supplied by the Royal Ontario Museum. Lowe-Martin printed it as a booklet of six Permanent domestic-rate stamps, accompanied by an Official First Day Cover. Florenceville, New Brunswick, where the log cabin quilt was made, is the cancellation location.

The four textiles used across the stamps and packaging had also appeared in the Royal Ontario Museum exhibition Quilts: Made in Canada in 2024, giving the postal issue a documented museum and material-culture connection.