Quality education is an often-heard term that has no single meaning. In this paper, we use the metaphor of mat weaving to structure an exploration of various elements that inform quality education. To form the mat, a warp of literature-derived threads is woven with the weft of practitioners' ideas of quality education. These local perspectives were gifted through "tok stori," a Melanesian oral form, through a session held at the OCIES 2022 Conference at the Fiji National University. The session brought together frontline educators from diverse Pacific settings to explore the dynamics of quality across contexts "from the ground up," a seldom investigated direction. The woven discussion includes explorations of tensions between colonial pasts and the present, and points to hopeful expectations about the not-yet-here. The resultant mat balances prevalent notions of quality that flow from distant places into Pacific settings with locally derived positional understandings, and in so doing offers contextual flesh and currency to some of the key concepts valued by regional initiatives.