Love for our team, stitched into every patch.

The Home of the Tides quilt project celebrates the first monumental season of pro women’s soccer in Halifax by taking all the love and excitement of the fans and stitching it into a giant patchwork quilt. All season long, fans shout words of support from the bleachers and uplifting the team with encouraging energy. We’ve captured some of that fan love and made it tangible by stitching it into this community quilt.

At the last game of the 2025 season, artists from the OSO team set up art tables with scraps of fabric and paint markers. We asked fans to take a moment to write and draw messages for the team by asking: What do you love about the Tides? Folks of all ages, longtime athletes and new soccer fans, people from Halifax and visitors from away, all participated in making patches. The patches include messages about the power of women in sport, the joy and excitement that fans feel for the team, and the love for the game that brings people together. If you take a closer look, you’ll see drawings of tidal waves, rainbows, soccer balls, and lots of love for Jawslyn the shark.

Quilt-making is a longtime tradition used to celebrate major life moments. Throughout history, women have been gathering and making each other quilts to celebrate new homes, growing families, important milestones, and showing one another community support. This quilt builds on those traditions by marking this historic moment in women’s pro sports. As the team heads into season two, it reminds the Tides that they are wrapped in a whole lot of community love.

About OSO
OSO planning + design is an interdisciplinary team of artists, designers, planners, and educators with over 30 years of collective experience working collaboratively with youth and communities. Their expertise includes urban planning and design, architecture, design-build, public art, participatory design, and community engagement. Every endeavour builds on a comprehensive understanding of the community to imagine what is possible, invent a future together, and distill visions into practical actions that take the form of physical interventions, community plans, policies, programs, or special projects.

At OSO, our work is not just about planning and design. It’s about making meaningful change in the community. Every project we undertake is grounded in a participatory approach that is community-based, locally focused and action-oriented. We strive to open up the planning and design process to demystify, inspire, and build capacity within the community, leaving a lasting impact and ownership. We see our role in all projects as upholding the community vision throughout every phase.

Approach
OSO’s approach is open, participatory, comprehensive, and yields tangible outcomes. Each design process is uniquely created for the place, people, goals, and dreams that the project emerged from. Through workshops, educational programs, art projects, and creative engagement tools, we engage youth and community members in planning, design, and construction. We invite many forms of community involvement throughout all phases to ensure that the project builds on lived experience, knowledge and connection to place while instilling a strong sense of collective ownership in the final results.

Project Team

Michael MacLean, Kieran Stepan, Jen Frail, Dan Braaten, Cat Simard, Holly Edmonds, Daisy Van Der Wee, Emma Macdonald, Brianna Nickerson, Frank Palermo, John Follett, Jonathan. Alex Campbell