I’ve had a very quiet September and my work has involved a huge amount of hand stitching. Most of this is secret sewing for future projects and so I feel like I have very little to show for the many hours I’ve spent sewing since my last post!

I do have some newsy stuff to tell you including a pattern sale and some new fabric bundles. But first lets talk about all this slow stitching.

The idea of spending my days hand sewing has always appealed but be careful what you wish for as it turns out you can have too much of a good thing! I have been feeling close to overwhelmed by the queue of projects waiting for my needle over the last few weeks.

I have started working on some brand new ideas for something quite long term that won’t come to fruition till next year (sneak peek above). I’m working on a large project for a magazine commission which is due at the end of November. I’m very excited about this one! Here is a sneak peek…

I am also stitching away on samples for my next visit to Sewing Street in October. This involves some new Dream Flowers, more on this below.

Next week I am starting to record the videos for my next Thread House Academy online class Lotus Flower Sewing Bag. Recording the videos is usually very arduous and angsty but I’m actually looking forward to it this time as a break from all the hand stitching!

In preparation I made a new version of the bag (as much to remember how to make it as to iron out a few pattern niggles) and this involved more hand sewing!!

I decided to try out some sashiko on the extra petals prior to making the bag. I did enjoy this sashiko and love how the bag turned out. I even got the magnetic pincushion to work properly this time.

We have just launched Term 2 of this year’s Academy which includes this class. If you fancy a great deal that includes the Lotus Bag class alongside Lynne’s and Karen’s flower themed classes then jump on our Early Bird offer and get 20% off until 30th September. This basically means you get three classes for the price of two. No code needed the discount has already been applied.

Read more about the individual classes here and purchase by clicking the button below.

Academy Term 2 2026/27

We will be offering the Lotus Flower Sewing Bag as a single class in around a month’s time and it will go live on November 1st.

I’m still working away on this year’s Temperature Quilt (all hand sewing) and despite getting June finished last month (above) this has now stalled again and been sent to the back of the queue. Here are the first 6 months of Handloom Blooms. Read more about this project here.

And speaking of Handloom, stock of this gorgeous fabric has finally arrived in the UK! We’ve had a few dribs and drabs over the summer but due to very high demand we have been waiting for the full yardage to appear.

I’ve been using this line so much since I was sent sample FQs late last year. It is wonderful to hand sew with but stable enough to piece as well, and it comes in so many shades! The designer is Tara Faughnan and it’s by Windham Fabrics.

When I got my sample pieces I worked with Jo of A Beautiful Thing on a range for her to sell (she couldn’t take the full line unfortunately as it’s too vast for her to stock) and then curated these into 3 separate bundles: Paintbox, Earthy and Jewel.

Jo has these for sale as of yesterday (some in stock, some pre-order, due end of the month) in both FQ and F1/8 versions. Click on the button below to go to my page on Jo’s site and find out what all the fuss is about!

Handloom Bundles

I’ve also managed to squeeze in a new Map Wandering!

I haven’t quilted this one as I am planning to stretch it around a box canvas as I did my first map. I have bought some cheap canvasses and have made this one to fit. Read more about these here.

One of the things that is slightly annoying me with all this hand sewing is so much of it is to deadlines and therefore has to be prioritised which is stopping me from working on the ‘fun stuff’ like another map!

Back to the new Dream Flowers. I have designed 6 new ones (well 5 as one is a version of an unpublished earlier flower) for a Sewing Street project. I will share about this in more detail soon but you can see a little video of the new flowers below (some are duplicated due to multiple projects).

As the Sewing Street projects need to be kitted I have to use regular craft cotton rather than my usual soft wovens (which are a little easier to hand appliqué). So I am planning on making all the flowers again in my regular style soon. So far I only have one finished!

All the new Dream Flowers have names which I have already made up. This is Delinia.

As with my new Dream Birds Projects on Sewing Street earlier in the year you will be able to buy these new patterns through their website once I’ve been on the show (I will be back with more on this nearer the time).

So with all this attention on the new flowers and birds I thought maybe we could give the old ones a little love…

Let’s have an AUTUMN SALE!

It’s been ages since I offered any discounts on my PDF Patterns so from now until next Sunday 28th September I have 25% off all my Dream Birds and Dream Flowers patterns! This includes my Hills Pillow and the Fabric Book instructions too. No need for a code, the discount has already been applied. Just click on the button below to go to the website page.

Dream Flowers and Birds

Meanwhile I better get back to my hand sewing!

I have a couple of new quilts to share today. Both of these came out of class samples and both measure about 31” square, however there the similarities end.

I have now almost completely retired from in person teaching (two more gigs to go in October and November!) and this year has felt a bit like a farewell tour for me as I tick off my last few commitments before switching to online teaching exclusively.

In July I visited the Romsey Quilt Festival in the South of England to lecture and teach two full day workshops. I really had a wonderful time and felt so welcome and appreciated by all. I will certainly miss these personal interactions when I finally retreat to my studio but I know it’s the right time to make this change for the sake of my work/life balance.

I taught my Supernova class at Romsey. This was created for an online class and a new project to teach my Freehand Foundation Piecing technique. The original quilt incorporates both my Dandelion Clock and Sea Urchin patterns. Unfortunately by the time the Romsey Quilters requested this I had already sold the original quilt.

This meant I needed to reproduce at least one quarter to share with the class so they could see what we were trying to make! I used my new favourite solid fabric, Windham’s Artisan Cotton. The colour palette I chose for the Liminal Space Medallion for the Love Patchwork and Quilting BOM is still really doing it for me aesthetically and as I had enough leftovers I used this for the class sample.

In preparation and during the class I made a start on another quarter through my step models. I was halfway towards a new version of the quilt. But I really do hate to repeat myself. I find it almost physically painful to do this.

And then I remembered this mini quilt I made last year.

It was created due to the same problem. I had a quarter block step model left over from the appliqué garland pattern from my first book, New Patchwork and Quilting Basics. And I couldn’t bear to stitch another 3 to finish the pattern. So instead I created a ‘Dream Flower’ version of the design and two new machine stitched quarters using my Freehand Foundation Piecing technique.

I had really liked this experiment and wanted to try more of these garland quarter mash-ups. So I decided to hand stitch two Dream Flower type garland quarters in the same fabric to match the Supernova quarters. I then mixed in some machine improv curves to finish. This left me with a lot of leftover curves which I couldn’t help putting together to create this extra block. I’m not sure what to do with this one yet but I do love creating with leftovers!

I love how dynamic the bright colours and shapes look against the black background! But then how to quilt it… I had added the tiniest bit of embroidery to the appliqué - on the leaf stem and at the top of the turquoise flowers and I was in two minds whether to add more. But then I thought I would need to add this to the Supernova quarters too so maybe I should hand quilt the whole thing with the Aurifil 8wt cotton?

After a suggestion from Lynne (we always seek advice on these matters from our Thread House WhatsApp group) I decided to go for a machine matchstick on my Handi Quilter MoxieXL. I used a variegated black and white Aurifil 40/3 cotton. In the photo above you can see the SewTites magnets which I use to ‘baste’ the layers to the frame. They make the whole thing so much easier and quicker!

I decided to call this Superflowernova but every time I say it my brain starts singing ‘Supercalifragilistic…’ from Mary Poppins!

The second quilt featured today was created for the Moon Trees online class which was my most recent one for The Thread House Academy. I taught the technique using a range of different sized blocks and wanted to show how I had built up my Moon Trees quilt with all these different sized units and no planning from the start.

This is the result. It’s obviously a mini version of the original as I didn’t have time to hand sew a whole new full sized quilt. I wanted try a different colour palette so used warm shades of orange, red and yellow with some blue, turquoise and greys. The colours remind me of a sunset hence the name.

I decided to expand on my ‘kissing leaf’ FMQ pattern for this one. I used this earlier this year to quilt my Monthly Trees Temperature Quilt but this time I added another leaf shape with a sort of five pointed sycamore leaf. I’m so enjoying finishing these smaller quilts on my MoxieXL at the moment and need to finish something else quick so I can get back to the joyful quilting part!

This class is still available to buy now if you fancy having a go yourself. In fact so is my Supernova class.

And speaking of our Academy we have just launched our next class. We are bringing back our very popular Masterclass series for this year’s programme of classes.

After a two year break we are again using our ‘extra month’ to take a deep dive into a crucial quilting subject. And we are starting off with Half Square Triangles.

I’m not a huge fan of these but was happy to give improv piecing a try. I’ll be showing you how to create this dynamic modern block complete with wonky star and sawtooth border. And we will make HST fun (and possible!)!

Lynne and Karen both covering the traditional and FPP methods with new block designs and you get all three lessons with this one single class which goes live on September 1st. All our classes are pre-recorded videos with captioned subtitles that come with LIFETIME ACCESS so you can watch them at your convenience and keep them to watch again later. Click on the button below to head to our store where you can find out more info about all our offerings.

Academy Store

One more piece of news to share. I am this week’s guest on Sam Hunter’s RevCraftBiz podcast. It’s a long and wide ranging chat about my life as an artist and an entrepreneur.

I am very proud to have been earning my living solely as a self employed person since I was 21 and I loved getting a chance to talk about my approach to the business side of things.

We also discuss temperature quilts, the 100 Day Projects I’ve done and much more! It was such a joy to record and I hope you enjoy listening to it. Just click on the button below or search for it wherever you listen to podcasts.

RevCraftBiz Podcast

In 2019 I attended QuiltCon in Nashville and took a class on patchwork maps with the incredibly talented Timna Tarr.

I’ve always been fascinated by maps and loved the idea of creating one with fabric but I also wanted to spend the day with my dear pal Dolores who wanted to take the class too. Dolores lives in Virginia so I don’t get to see her very often. We met through the quilting blogging community back in 2009 and have managed to meet up IRL every few years since our first meeting in London at the Fat Quarterly Retreat back in 2012.

The class prep involved choosing the location for your map and I chose Shangri la Farm where I live. This is the 7 acre ex-smallholding that we bought in 2010. We planted thousands of trees and re-wilded it so it is now beautiful woodland. My husband, Jonathan, did landscape this intentionally as well, creating pathways, ponds and some featured planting of particular trees. This means we have various landmarks that have names such as ‘cherry walk’, ‘the top pond’, ‘Lola’s memorial garden’, ‘piney ridge’ etc. I thought it would be wonderful to capture all this in a map. So I came to the class with a large sheet of paper with the whole thing drawn out.

As I was hand stitching my map I didn’t get too much done in the class. But I luckily wrote a QuiltCon Report blog post when I came home which includes this photo of my first stitching…

I did stitch more when I got home but it wasn’t close to being finsihed when I put it away to start something else. It then became a long running WIP. Occasionally I got it out and added a bit more and probably shared it on Instagram (but it’s too far back for me to find any images!).

Meanwhile our land and the buildings kept changing as we partially demolished and re-built our house.

A few months back I found it in a bag and thought ‘I MUST do something with this!’. I decided to cut my losses and concentrate on the area that had the most stitching, cut away the rest, and then just let myself loose with the whole concept.

Instead of trying to faithfully represent reality I would just make stuff up. This was not long after I had begun my Stitch Wanderings so I decided to make this a ‘Map Wandering’ and add simple shapes and embroidery embellishment in the same free playful way that I made my Stitch Wanderings.

As soon as I started working on this again with this new ethos it was a joy to stitch and I finished the piece in no time.

It had originally been sewn on top of a foundation fabric (where the map had been marked out) and with all the extra layers of appliqué I didn’t think that it needed extra layers through quilting. So I decided to try out framing it over a ‘box canvas’. Except I got Jonathan to make the frame for me to the exact size. It’s more of a wooden tray really.

I sewed on side pieces (as if I was making a box gusset for a bag with very shallow sides) and then Jonathan stapled it to the back.

It worked really well and it now hangs in my dining room! It still has some recognisable aspects of Shangri la Farm but it now has this fantasy element that makes it more magical and mysterious.

So I thought ‘I wonder if I could try this again but in a more intentional way?’. The first Map Wandering had been accidental but maybe I could just make up an imaginary map?

And that’s what I did!

I started with an A3 sized piece of yellow Essex Linen and I drew roads and a stream and a pond and then I just started stitching fabric on to the ‘land’ areas (rather than the roads) using needle turn appliqué.

Once I had all the main land and water areas I added bridges and trees and lots of simple fun shapes. The best bit was adding the three fishes to the pond! I love a row of fish all lined up!

I do really enjoy adding all the embroidery stitches using Aurifil 8wt cotton thread. Every time I create another of these ‘wanderings’ I discover more ways to use the stitches to express myself. I’m loving this journey!

I decided to finish this map as a mini quilt. The vast majority of stitching was done prior to layering up but I left areas (like the white stitching at the sides of the roads) for hand quilting through all the layers. I used 12wt cotton for this so it was easier on my hands.

I’m already itching to make another one of these Map Wanderings, It’s turning into a new obsession! Once I have finessed my process I will work out a way to share it with you. I have plans for something next year…

Happy Wanderings everyone!

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It was back in 2018 when I started writing about the Social Bite Village Quilt Drive on my original blog. You can read the first post here and find out how I came to become involved in it.

Last May I wrote the 2025 update post here when I delivered another 10 quilts to the Village.

A few weeks back I delivered this latest batch of 14 quilts!

Back in May I was just getting started on quilting some of my orphan block tops and thinking about the next batch for the quilt drive when I got an email from my contact at Social Bite saying that they were about to relocate the whole village to a new site nearby and did I have some quilts I could bring? And could they get them in about two weeks time?

Yikes! I checked the cupboard and it was a little bare with only 3 quilts ready to go (plus the one I was currently quilting). I remembered that a regular donator, Paula, had promised me 3 more as soon as I needed them but that still wouldn’t be enough as the new village would house 16 recently homeless people.

Why were they moving the Village? Well it was something that had always been in the pipeline, “The decision to relocate was prompted by the expected end of the current lease on land donated by Edinburgh City Council — it was always part of our plan to make good use of a “meanwhile site” that would otherwise have been unoccupied. Fortunately, the pre-fabricated houses were purposefully designed for easy relocation.”

So the 10 original houses that had been designed (but not built) by my husband, Jonathan (who used to build Tiny Houses for a living) would be joined by 6 new ones and a brand new hub. I really wanted as many of these houses to have a quilt as possible so I put a call out to lots of my local quilting pals including my sewing group, The Golden Bobbins, and members of the Edinburgh Modern Quilt Guild and these amazing quilters pulled out all the stops and with in just a few weeks I had 14 quilts ready to go! I am so grateful to them all and we will hear more about them when I feature the quilts below.

But then the grand opening was postponed! I was all set to go with Jonathan and deliver the quilts at the same time. And then write a blog post all about it using photos I would take on the day. Never mind it would happen in a few weeks and hopefully I would still make it. But just in case I decided to deliver the quilts to their office.

Unfortunately the opening was postponed once more and by the time it actually happened at the end of June I couldn’t make the date. So I have had to take these photos from their social media.

Since then July has been a bit crazy with work so I am finally writing this post today and honouring all the fabulous quilters who contributed to this latest drive!

Let’s start with lovely Paula Collings who was a regular student of mine back in myBearpaw days and is still a student now through The Thread House Academy! Paula has donated so many quilts over the years that I have lost count.

The two quilts above were both made using The Thread House BOM club patterns. The top one is a gorgeous version of our Folk Dance quilt and the one above includes blocks from our Free Bird BOM.

Paula also donated this stunning sashiko quilt made by her and the ‘Get Crafty’ group which meet at Pentland Community Centre. Look at all that beautiful stitching!!

Thank you so much Paula and your group!

Another serial donator to this drive is Barbara Gillespie, another old student and member of Edinburgh MQG.

Barbara donated these two quilts made using the same fabric line. One of them uses the Stream pattern from my book New Patchwork and Quilting Basics.

Barbara’s quilting is so beautiful and suits the quilts perfectly. Huge thanks to Barbara for giving away such gorgeous quilts.

Suzanne Foster is a quilter from Hampshire who emails me most years and offers one or two quilts. Earlier this year she sent these two plaid quilts made from tartan swatch books that she bought from a car boot sale. I love how sustainable these are and so perfect for our Scottish location!

You will also notice that it’s one of Suzanne’s lovely quilts on the bed in the photos from the village above. Thank you Suzanne!

Lucy Engels is a local pal (who loves karaoke!) and a very talented quilt designer. Recently she had a huge clear out of her orphan blocks and members of the Edinburgh MQG took loads for making charity quilts. I really wanted some of those orphan blocks but resisted the urge due to already having so many of my own!

My other karaoke pal, Pam, and a few other members of EMQG managed to get a couple of quilts made from the blocks and quilted pronto when I put the call out. The diamond quilt above was pieced by Pam and Elspeth and Elspeth did the quilting.

This quilt was put together by Barbara (again!) and Emry.

One more quilt came from the Edinburgh MQG group. This was made by Ursula, Janet and Barbara (yes her again!). Huge thanks to all the EMQG folks!

One of our first ever The Thread House retreaters, Dawn Bradfield, kindly sent me 8 beautiful quilt tops last year that she was never going to get around to quilting.

I was a bit overwhelmed as I still have a stack of orphan block tops myself to quilt. So I approached Caroline Silander, another member of the EMQG charity group (and another ex-student and TTH retreater!) who had recently bought a Handi Quilter Amara longarm to see if she would like to practice on some of these.

Caroline took 6 and one of these has been finished and sent to woman’s hospice already. Caroline leapt into action when I put the recent call out for SBVQD and got two quilts finished!

I love how these quilts are ending up as collaborations from quilters from all over the country! Thank you to Caroline and of course Dawn!

Caroline has just set herself up in business as a longarmer. Do check out her website here if you are looking for some excellent quilting!

I mentioned that I was quilting a charity quilt when Social Bite got in touch. This is one of the quilt tops made at a Golden Bobbins charity sewing day a couple of years ago using orphan blocks given to me by Karen Lewis. Karen gave my such a huge bag of these that I am still working my way through them. But each quilt that comes out of this bag is stunning due to Karen’s amazing eye for colour and design!

Finally this quilt joined the stack. I had made it in January 2023 out of orphan blocks and class samples. I made a number of these quilts at the time, using up so many blocks that I had been hoarding. They also provided valuable practice time on my Handi Quilter MoxieXL longarm.

All the others went to charities but I couldn’t bear to part with this one due to the high quantity of significant historical blocks, like Avery Garlands and Patchwork People. But the need was great this time and I felt ready to let it go.

The total now stands at 138 quilts over the last 8 years!! Woohoo!

You can read more about the Social Bite Village here and please do let me know if you have any quilts you could donate. We always need more as the residents rotate every year to 18 months. We will take any useful size!

I will leave you with my schedule for FOQ for anyone who is visiting. Click here to read the accompanying Instagram post.

Whenever I see images of fantastic patchwork garments being worn at quilt shows I always think ‘I must try harder to make something for myself’. But usually I run out of time before the event takes place.

But not this year! This year you will see me coming from quite a long way off at Festival of Quilts in this hooded vest!

I saw this pattern on Instagram a few months back and immediately wanted to make it. I loved the hood and the simplicity of the construction. It’s called Soft Armour and it’s by Justice McNeil Sumser better known as Thread and Sprout on Instagram.

I loved it even more when I read the designer’s thoughts behind it, “Inspired by chainmail hoods, helmets, and heraldry-adorned tabards worn by knights of ye olde times, but made of soft, squishy, warm quilted fabric. A wearable reminder to not harden your heart even though the world is hard.”

One of my current obsessions is medieval history so this was pushing all my buttons. Even more so when Justice brought some magic into it and described the garment as “a fabric spell of protection and something to remind you of safety” and encouraged us to weave in our own spells of protection as we made it.

When I bought the pattern I had no clear idea what I would use to make it. At the same time I had just finished my Liminal Space Medallion BOM quilt for Love Patchwork and Quilting magazine and as well as left over fabrics I had some spare blocks and some trial blocks that didn’t make the final design. I had put these aside to maybe use for a mini quit later.

I really love the Windham Artisan Cottons and especially the palette I had chosen for that quilt so I’ve been using it for almost every new project since.

I wanted some in-progress EPP to help illustrate the Flower Sewing Bag class I am teaching at The Thread House Academy later in the year so I used Karen’s gorgeous Atelier EPP pattern to create this lovely piece (above). I was thinking this would look fabulous on the back of a denim jacket when the idea struck me that I could use it and all my Liminal Space leftovers for the Soft Armour!

I just needed a bit more time in the schedule and maybe one more block for the front. I then started work on my latest TTH Academy class Moon Trees and realised that a Moon Tree panel would be perfect for the front of the garment. And what better protection to weave in than my beloved trees!

I put together the front and back panels a few weeks back but only managed the hood a few days ago. It’s been a busy summer with lots of trips away and my latest was to Romsey Quilt Festival where I taught a couple of workshops, one of which was Supernova Stardust. Of course I chose the same fabrics for my class samples. I’m working on something new with most of these but I still had a couple of spare bits I didn’t need and these formed the basis of the hood (along with some improv stripes that didn’t work out for the quilt design).

Once all the panels were complete I quilted then on my domestic machine using ‘random plaid’ grid and a pale aqua shade of Aurifil 28wt thread. I used the same flannel for the wadding as I used for my 100 Days of Mini Stitch Wanderings quilt to keep the pieces as light as possible.

The construction was very quick and mainly involves lots of bias binding. I chose to use a button with an elastic loop rather than the press studs suggested in the pattern.

I love how this turned out! It’s much more versatile for wearing to shows than a quilted jacket and the cropped length is perfect for a little person like me. And I think the hood just makes it look extra cool (though I doubt I will actually wear it up!).

I will feel like a walking work of art when I am wearing this and I think it perfectly conveys my style of quilting. Plus I now feel thoroughly protected!

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I wrote about my 100 Day project for 2026 back in March in this post here. I’m so happy I was able to see the project through to the end and I’m delighted with the finished result!

Unlike my previous two 100 day projects, which both became fabric books, this one was always intended to be a quilt. I started the whole thing off by planning out the layout of my background squares (as documented in the first post) but it still took a while to decide the final layout.

The subject itself was based on my recent Stitch Wanderings but scaled down to a manageable size for a daily practice.

To produce a cohesive quilt from these my plan was to colourwash the cooler backgrounds from blue to green and do the same with the motifs from hotter pinks to orange. But I had a lot more variety of colours for the actual stitch wanderings (so as not to get too bored!), including yellow, red, purple and black and white so it took a lot of pondering until I was happy with the layout.

Sewing 100 blocks together takes quite a while! I always think this will be a quick job as I am used to 12 or 16 block quilts but 100 is another matter, like making a whole quilt from scratch!

And then there was the thorny question of how to quilt… I had made things difficult for myself (again!) with all that hand stitched embellishment. With my Moon trees quilt I had tackled this by using FMQ with a fine thread to create ghostly trees as an over all pattern.

But this one was so busy with these tiny blocks packed with stitches that I didn’t think FMQ would work. Originally I planned to machine quilt a grid with a line either side of the seam so I could leave the blocks mainly untouched. But after taking advice from The Thread House team I was encouraged to hand quilt the grid instead so as to keep the hand stitching integrity of the quilt.

I chose an Aurifil 28wt in a pale aqua shade for this, I wanted a much finer thread than I had used for embellishment so as not to confuse this quilting stitching with that. I wanted the quilting to be as unobtrusive as possible but still give a lovely texture. I’ve been quilting away in the evenings while watching all the football for the last couple of weeks. I finished and bound the quilt on Wednesday and luckily the weather behaved enough on Thursday to get these images late on in the day.

One of my favourite bits about this quilt is the two ‘journal’ type blocks that were inspired by daily events and that really place the quilt in a particular time and place.

The first was to commemorate NASA’s Artemis mission earlier this year. Like most of us back on Earth I was very engaged with this mission and when I saw the diagrams of the Orion capsule’s route I knew it would make a perfect stitch wandering.

The second is much more personal. As a lifelong Arsenal fan and proud North Londoner (my great uncle, Jimmy Brain, played for the club back in the 1920’s and is still one of their best goal scorers of all time) I was beyond ecstatic when they won the Premier League back in May after 22 years. I planned this particular Stitch Wandering for the day of the big North London Parade as my way of celebrating (not being able to be there in person). It’s a big abstract A in red and white (the club colours) with the Arsenal canon symbol and some fireworks exploding in the sky.

What I love most about this quilt is how it contains so much future inspiration. Thinking up a new design every day really pushes your creativity to the limits. Sometimes that can feel daunting but it definitely produces results. I came up with so many new patterns and shapes that I know I will use again and again.

The quilt is like a giant sketchbook packed with great ides that I can come back to anytime I need a spark. My previous fabric books have definitely proved this to be true. My first 100 Day Project ‘100 Days of Organic Appliqué with Embellishments’ spawned my Dream Flowers pattern collection (which in turn gave birth to my Dream Birds!), and my Giant Trilobite quilt was directly inspired by one of those tiny blocks!

It is this continuum of inspiration that keeps me coming back to the 100 Day Project. In fact I have been deep diving into the whole subject recently as I have been writing a brand new presentation for Festival of Quilts ‘The 100 Day Project for Quilters’ (which I am actually debuting tomorrow for a group of Canadian quilters via Zoom!) I’ve been interviewing and researching a number of other quilters who have taken part along with Lindsay Jean Thomson who leads the project.

The projects origins lie in a workshop taught by Graphic Designer, Micheal Bierut, to his Yale grad students 20 years ago. He wrote a blogpost after 5 years of teaching this activity which you can read here. Michael says, “I’ve always had a fascination with the ways that creative people balance inspiration and discipline in their working lives. It’s easy to be energised when you’re in the grip of a big idea. But what do you do when you don’t have anything to work with?”.

I found this so interesting as the answer to that question to me now is ‘go back and look at some of my previous 100 day projects!’.

If you’d like to take part in a future project or just want to find out more do check out the 100 Day Project website here and sign up to the newsletter.

There are still tickets available for my lecture at FOQ which you can buy here (just head to ‘talks’ and search Jo Avery).

Or perhaps you are part of a guild or group who sometimes engage speakers for talks via Zoom? If so I would be delighted to present this new talk to you! Just email me or comment below for more info.

I will leave you with this very pertinent quote by Maja Angelou which one of the featured quilters, Shannon Fraser, shared with me when she kindly sent me all the info about her 100 Day project:

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

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As part of my role as Moxie Mentor Ambassador for Pinhole Quilting I’ve been developing a new workshop especially for their Handi Quilter customers.

This one is a bit different for me as it is focussing on the quilting side rather than improv piecing or hand stitching. I taught beginners FMQ for many years when I had my Edinburgh studio but haven’t gone beyond this as I would never consider myself to be a maestro on things like intricate feathers or ruler work.

However I have developed my own unique style over the years, something I call Modern Improv Doodles. I like to use simple graphic patterns and drift between them adding details here and there. I’ve now got quite a few signature moves and this class is a way to share these ideas and my approach with other long armers (though all of this could be achieved on a domestic machine this class is specifically for Pinhole Quilting’s customers).

But nobody wants to spend all day quilting (it can be quite intense!) so to break the class up and offer more tuition we will start with a simple Freehand Curves Landscape. This is the basis for my Poplars quilt (and online class) and similar to my recent February Landscape art quilt but without any trees.

This should give us a good sized top to practice the different quilting motifs, and the curved sections will provide definite areas to fill. I will be teaching some of my favourite designs such as coffee beans, interlocking squares, contours, micro girds and kissing leaves. The hot pink fabric I used on the back really helps show off the quilting.

Finally we will finish with a little hand stitched embellishment using these felt ‘sand dollars’. I love adding a little stitchy texture to my work and these are quick and easy to so.

If you are a Handi Quilter customer in the UK and would like to join me for this class then tickets just went on sale! The workshop is on Sunday 25th October. Just click on the button below for more.

Meandering Landscape Class

The workshop includes all the fabric and supplies needed to make this piece. I chose these Marcia Derse fabrics from Windham for my sample as I thought they were so cool and unusual and Pinhole are providing the same (or similar) from Marcia Derse’s collections for the kit. I will provide the felt and the Aurifil 8wt thread.

I like this fabric range so much that I used it for my latest Moon Trees sample. I bought my fabrics from Cotton Patch here.

I am currently recording my videos for the Moon Trees online class which goes live on 1st July and I wanted to try fabrics other than mu usual linen/woven textures to give students more options. I made one in Windham Artisan Cotton (below) and another in left overs from Meandering Landscape (above).

Expect lots more Moon Trees coming soon!

Meanwhile you can now sign up for this workshop, the next Thread House Academy class of 26/27, by clicking on the button below.

Moon Trees

I’m off to Sewing Street in the West Midlands next week. This is the shopping channel for all things sewing and crafty. I did a sort of book launch on here last August for Journey to the Centre of a Quilter and Karen, Lynne and I went on together to talk about The Thread House Academy.

Sewing Street were very keen to have us back so we are all on our way next week. I’m on Tuesday followed by all three of us as The Thread House on Wednesday (Lynne is actually on tomorrow too and Karen on Wednesday).

This time I am demoing my New York Beauty Brigade Quilt along with a separate cushion pattern. Sewing Street have created two separate kits for both projects, one with Liberty Palace Garden fabric and the other with Kaffe Fassett From The Archives collection.

I have made a cushion with both of these and will be taking my newest version of the quilt using Karen’s Friday Night fabric line (unfortunately it is too late to kit this collection).

I really LOVE the way the cushions look in these two different fabric lines and keep swinging between the two as to which is my favourite (currently the Kaffe!). I bet a quilt in either of these will be amazing.

Tune in at 9am as I demo how to make these blocks using FPP and curved piecing. You can also buy the patterns on their own and Sewing Street produce both printed versions and PDFs (for the same price). You can even buy all the FPP templates required to make the quilt as a set - all really helpful for those that don’t have home printers!

And then at 11am I’m presenting my Dream Birds Lap Quilt and Dream Birds Birdhouse cushion.

I have designed a couple of brand new Dream Birds (Pafutto and Crested Dumphy) and added in three Dream Birds that have never been available to buy as patterns before, due to being workshop subjects or exclusive giveaways (Fippet, Rosy Peeper and Fluffy Tailed Fandango). I’d been meaning to get patterns for these organised for a while but never got around to it. So instead I have created two new special projects for them.

And these are exclusives for Sewing Street! I won’t be publishing them on my own website (not for the forseeable future anyway).

I combined the 5 bird blocks with 4 cute birdhouse blocks to make the lap quilt or play mat. It measures 32” and I used Makower Linen Texture throughout and Aurifil 8wt for the embroidery.

The cushion includes Rosy Peeper and Paffuto standing on top of their birdhouses (which are on poles). Kits will be available to buy on the show to make the exact same versions of both projects.

Or you can buy the patterns (both PDF and printed again) on their own. So if you have been collecting my Dream Bird pattern bundles perhaps you would like the patterns for these new birds to add to the others?! If so don’t forget these are Sewing Street exclusives!

Excitingly the presenter that day is none other than Debbie Shore! She’s a bit of a sewing hero of mine so I may well be fangirling her a bit!

I will be demoing the needle-turn appliqué and embroidery techniques I use to create the Dream Birds on the show. I’ll also be talking about my book again and my Aurifil Moon Trees Collection.

And don’t forget to tune in again on Wednesday at 9am to watch Karen, Lynne and I talking about The Thread House Academy year ahead. We will be bringing in all our class samples to share and it’s always fun when we get together as we love a bit of gentle banter at each other’s expense!

This time the presenter is lovely John Scott. Do hang around once we have finished as Karen has two amazing hours of programmes ahead with some really special projects!

You can watch Sewing Street LIVE on your TV from the UK, OR on their website FROM ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD! And after broadcast they load all their programmes to YouTube. Click on the link below to find out more about this and find out TV station numbers etc.

Sewing Street

I hope you will be able to tune in, either live or later on, even if it’s just for the tutorials or to enjoy my company 😉.

Thank you friends! Jo x

Some new projects are about to come to fruition after many months of gestation so expect a big rush of blog posts over the next few weeks!

First up is my new Block of the Month series for Love Patchwork and Quilting magazine. I was a very early designer for this publication with my clamshell cushion appearing in issue 3. I used to design for them all the time until they launched Today’s Quilter as a sister magazine and I sort of switched to that one.

I have designed three BOM quilts for Today’s Quilter but this will be my first for LPQ! And it’s not even a proper BOM - it’s a Medallion Quilt… Introducing the Liminal Space Medallion.

I had the idea for this quilt a few years back but it’s taken awhile for things to align with the magazine slot and my other commitments. I actually started making the quilt back in December.

My idea had always been to create an Improv Medallion that could be worked on over ten months (the length of an LPQ BOM series). I decided to use Windham Fabrics Artisan Cotton and chose this gorgeous range of colours which Windham kindly sent me. This is my new favourite solid fabric, it’s got such a lovely feel, almost like shot cotton and the shades are rich and vibrant.

In the end I didn’t use the blue, yellow or white but the others are all included.

I wanted this quilt to be a very gentle introduction to improv piecing. The wonkiness is constrained by the need to fit the rounds together, so as well as some piecing freedom there is a lot of accurate measuring required.

I also wanted to offer a range of techniques and for it to look like a Jo Avery quilt at the end, so I started off with my trademark Freehand Foundation Piecing technique to produce the ‘Cogs’ centre square.

For the subsequent rounds (and months) I’ve also included some simple appliqué along with classic improv patterns such as wonky crosses, log cabins, forks and strings of beads. Using improv piecing offers the opportunity to be more spontaneous and creative and to include subtle variations to help you make your own unique version of the quilt.

Having designed a number of medallions before (and taught them as courses when I had my Edinburgh store) I know that they can be tricky as each round needs to fit perfectly around the one before. I have designed this medallion to be off-centre and unsymmetrical so that each round is made up of two separate motifs. This should make the construction much more forgiving and beginner friendly.

Keeping with the ‘Classic Jo Avery’ vibe I quilted this on my Handi Quilter MoxieXL with my favourite ‘random plaid’ grid and Aurifil 40/3 cotton in shade 2000.

And what about the name? Liminal Spaces are places of transition. The word “liminal” comes from the Latin word “limen” which means threshold and I’m hoping this BOM can be a threshold or doorway between a modern geometric quilt and the mysterious and sometimes scary world of improv piecing.

At first glance this quilt appears to be a geometric medallion but look closer and the motifs start to move and shimmer between sizes and shades and the overall effect is unique and even a bit uncanny.

Interested in joining me on this journey? Well now is the time to subscribe.

The BOM starts in issue 165 on sale 1st July.To get the first issue, you will need to subscribe by 27th May and I have an offer for you…

£10 off min spend £35, using code JAV10OFF! Click the button below to go to the website and use the code at checkout

Love Patchwork and Qulting Subscriptions

Want to make your quilt in the same fabric and colours as mine?

I have teamed up with A Beautiful Thing to provide a full quilt kit in the same Windham Artisan Cottons as I used!

And she has a fabulous pre-order limited time offer if you order before 27th May. Click on the button below to view

Liminal Space BOM Quilt Kit

Of course this quilt can be made in any fabric you like and so do feel free to use up your stash for this. I’m excited to see different versions popping up!

And if you’d like some more Jo Avery in your magazines then the latest issue of Today’s Quilter (140) features my In Full Bloom Wall Hanging.

I used Fableism on an Essex Linen background and embellished with Aurifil 12wt wool to make this one.

Jo from ‘A Beautiful Thing’ has produced two new bundles so you can make this exact version of the wall hanging - a small version with just enough for all the flowers or a larger version which will give you more Fableism to play with later. View both here

Fabric Bundles

I really do hope you like the look of this new BOM quilt and that lots of you want to take part.

Jo xx

We are about to launch Year 4 of our online teaching Academy over at The Thread House this week.

For newer readers The Thread House is Karen Lewis, Lynne Goldsworthy and myself. We have been working together for 10 years now! We began by organising retreats and then switched to mainly online events during covid. In 2023 we launched our Academy, a year long programme of online classes with a new subject every month.

And now we are ready to launch Year 4! We always divide the year into 3 terms and each term has a theme. This year our themes are ‘Trees’, ‘Flowers’ and ‘Buildings’, in other words we are creating a whole new Thread House World!

For the Tree term I will be teaching my Moon Trees class. This will encompass all my Moon Tree inspired projects from small panels that can be used as coasters or framed pictures to large trees that can become Temperature Tree Quilts or a Family Tree like this new panel (above) that I have created especially for the class.

Or why not make the full Moon Trees quilt!? I create these appliqué trees by ‘drawing’ freehand with scissors and then turning my edges under as I go. I’m really looking forward to sharing this process in detail with all our students.

For each 4 month term we teach one class each and then do something different with the ‘extra’ month. For the first Academy year we created Masterclasses on Appliqué, Quilting and Binding (with these all still available to buy as single classes from our store). We are returning to this idea for Year 4 with 3 new Masterclasses and this time it’s all about the Acronyms with workshops on HST, FPP and EPP.

For the second term our focus is on flowers and instead of another quilt I have created this Lotus Flower Sewing Bag.

This takes the basic Japanese lotus flower lunch bag idea (which I have been making for many years) and improves it. First I have added four more petals for extra prettiness.

And then inside I have inserted a quilted fabric tray where you can organise your thread and notions. It includes a scissors pocket, an area for needles and a magnetic flower pin cushion (which you can also use to collect stray pins!).

I am especially pleased with my thread storage using elastic and buttons which not only stores them safely but you can also spool away the thread when you are using it. Check out this reel on Instagram which shows this in action. You can also use the pockets around the sides of the tray to organise your projects (it’s great for EPP).

And if that’s not enough I will also share this mini version which can include embellishment and is perfect as a ‘binding’ or ‘mending’ pouch.

Next up in Term 3 we tackle buildings and I am back in my comfort zone with some improv piecing. I am returning to one of my oldest workshops ‘Improv Houses’ with this new Fussy Cut Cabins class.

I taught a version of this for many years in my Edinburgh ‘myBearpaw’ studio and when I sold this business and retired most of my classes I made quilts with all the class samples including this improv house quilt below.

This quilt above was donated to the Siblings Together charity and shows all the different houses we will make in the new online class from simple sheds and two story houses to the more intricate and 3-dimensional cabin shown below.

I love fussy cutting fun things for the windows and the advantage of improv piecing means you can make the windows the right size for your motifs and finally use all those long hoarded Heather Ross or Alexander Henry fabrics (like the owls and gnomes shown here).

I plan to make a whole quilt of cabins and as this class won’t come up until next March I have plenty of time to add to these 4 blocks during the year ahead.

If you don’t want a whole quilt of cabins you could create one using the full range of improv buildings like my original above. Or just a one block cushion like my ‘Owl Cabin’ at the top of the page.

As well as my three classes Lynne and Karen are teaching their own amazing workshops. We are so excited about our offering this year! Do check out all of these along with reading more about my three on our new classes page…

New Academy Classes

You can buy either an Annual Pass or a Term 1 Pass when the Academy Year 4 launches on Thursday. And we will have a 25% off Early Bird discount from then until Monday night (27th) when our Taster Weekend ends.

If you’re not interested in trees but really like the sound of the flowers term then you can wait until later in the year and buy term 2. Or if you just like my Improv Cabin class you can wait until next February and buy this as just one single class. A new class is available every month and all can be bought as single classes (if you don’t want to commit to a full term or year).

All our workshops are pre-recorded videos that come with Lifetime access. This means you can take the class at your own convenience and watch the videos as many times as you like. And if you sign up to our Annual or Term Passes you also get to join our community platform and attend two Zoom sessions with us every month.

Have you signed up to our FREE Taster Weekend yet? This is a wonderful way to try out our Academy before committing, or why not just enjoy a freebie workshop with us!

I can’t wait to show you all how to make my Dream Birds Coin Purse!

Sign up to Taster Weekend

The Taster Weekend starts next Saturday at 10am. See you then!!

Yes I know it’s now April but I started this piece in February and the inspiration for it was quite interesting…

It was the artwork from my calendar which is by an artist called Annie Soudain. I was staring at February’s page thinking about how beautiful it was and how much it reminded me of the Freehand Curve Landscapes I have made and taught over the years (that eventually became my Poplars Quilt) when I was inspired to make a version of the calendar art in fabric!

I have always made my Poplars panels with straight line trees but I thought I would try curving the trees as an extra challenge. This means improv curves on both the horizontal and vertical lines plus some of the tree trunks (intended to be silver birch) were separately pieced before the freehand curves were cut.

To make things extra difficult I decided to use fabric from my linen/wovens stash including the 100% linen for the sky which was left over from a top I’d made (and was very stretchy for piecing!).

I had a plan for a lot of hand stitching and I knew I would enjoy this more with these softer fabrics. They also offered a more muted palette which I knew would suit the winter vibe.

Many of the fabrics used here are from my curated bundles available from A Beautiful Thing.

Once pieced I made another controversial decision. I decided to leave the back off the quilt! Instead I layered on to the wadding alone.

One reason for this was to cut down the amount of layers I would have to stitch through. Excessive hand quilting is not good for various old repetitive strain injuries that I’m not keen to re-awake. Stitching through less layers (and softer top fabrics to begin with) would make the process easier on my hands.

I also knew I wanted to use embroidery stitches such as cross and fly as well as hand quilting and these leave quite a messy back so this way I could add a backing afterwards and allow just a small amount of neat quilting to show.

The idea was to use hand quilting to create the bare wintery branches of the trees and then add texture to the layers of landscape with hand stitching in the same way that I had used machine sewn FMQ to add different patterns to this Poplars mini quilt below, made for The Thread House Academy Poplars Online Class.

I used Aurifil 8wt cotton thread throughout in coordinating shades along with their ‘almost black’ which I used for the tree branches. Despite the thickness of the thread and the amount of stitching it’s amazing how much the quilting still blends into the background. I ended up adding some orange to the trees on the left too.

I used the cross and fly stitches on the fields as planned, as well as some hand quilting ‘pebbles’. I wasn’t sure what to do with the large area at the bottom until I thought about sashiko.

I bought a new sashiko stencil template from the Scottish Quilting Show and used this for the foreground layer. It took ages but I think is was worth it!

Here is the back once I had finished the initial hand stitching. The other benefit of leaving the backing off is that I didn’t have to worry about knots which speeded the process up.

This was such a soothing piece to work on through the end of the winter. I became a little addicted to adding more and more stitches.

The final addition was some colonial knots to the birch trees.

Eventually I decided to stop and baste a backing. I then added new rows of hand quilting through all layers (and hidden knots!) and even more tree branches!

This is the finished back showing quite a lot of extra quilting through all the layers.

I used a faced binding to finish so it’s like the horizon just keeps on going beyond the quilt.

The dimensions are 29” x 31”.

I hadn’t intended to make this quilt at all. I have quite a tight schedule this spring and this wasn’t part of it. But I’m so pleased I acted on that initial calendar inspiration and took a few days off to create this top. The hand stitching was all done in the evenings or late afternoon when I need a break from work but it was already too dark to go outside for a walk.

Now we have much longer days already but I still have plenty of hand stitching to do! I am busy finishing up class samples for our Thread House Academy 26/27 launch on 25/26 April (Have you signed up to our FREE TASTER WEEKEND yet?!).

As it’s been a few weeks since my last post I didn’t get the chance to share our Easter Promotion with you. But you still have a few days left to take advantage of 20% off my Mini Chicken Pouch online class. Just use EASTER20 at checkout!

Mini Chicken Pouch Class

One last look at this new February Landscape quilt as I wish you all a happy Easter, Passover or whichever spring celebration you observe. Let’s wave goodbye to winter together!

The latest round of the 100 Days Project started on February 22nd and I am taking part again. This is my 3rd go at this wonderful online art project.

Every year, thousands of people all around the world commit to 100 days of creating. The idea is simple: choose a creative project, do it every single day for 100 days, and document and share your process online.

My first try was in 2023 which culminated in a fabric book of 100 Days of Organic Appliqué. I wrote about that one here. I also made a fabric book from last year’s project 100 Days of Tiny Abstract Appliqué.

This year I have chosen a similar theme, 100 Days of Mini Stitch Wanderings, but instead of a fabric book I am planning on turning my blocks in to a quilt!

Stitch Wanderings are my latest obsession and you can read more about them in this post. Basically they involve simple shapes which are needle turn appliquéd to a background and then simple embroidery stitching is applied to embellish or to add an extra layer of narrative to the piece.

They are the perfect subject for the 100 days project as they are a great way to explore and experiment with new ideas which is very much what the project is all about in my experience. In other words it’s a way of creating with more freedom and less pressure.

I chose a slightly larger block to my previous projects at 5” (finished) and I also took more time to plan the background squares to begin with, seeing as eventually these would all be sewn together as one piece rather than made into different ‘pages’.

I decided to use all cool blues to greens as the background and tried them out on my design wall as I cut them. I do love a colour wash quilt so that’s the idea here.

I then bagged up loads of scraps in 4 different sets: pinks, oranges, yellows and neutrals. I am using all my favourite linen mix/woven fabrics which come from a range of different places as I have been collecting these for years. However I do love Fableism fabric in particular (and there is plenty of this in my pull above) and you can find my curated bundles over at A Beautiful Thing.

A Beautiful Thing Jo's bundles

Before I started I jotted down tons of thumbnail ideas in my sketch book, both for the appliqué shapes and the stitching, to help get me started. I add to these all the time when an idea strikes me. This way I can always find some inspiration for that day’s block and never feel stuck. If I ever do feel stuck I just glance around - at nature, at art, at just the shapes that are all around us.

Using these two layers of appliqué and stitching makes things easier as I can repeat shapes but pair them with different stitching and visa versa.

Here are my first six blocks. I’m tending to put pinks with green and oranges with blues so I should get a secondary colourwash.

I’m now up to day 28 (which was yesterday). Each block is a little experiment, with some working better then others. But I know from previous experience that some of these will turn into little gems that will inspire future projects.

100 days does sound like a slog, and I have to say it can feel a bit like it too! I tend to do 2 - 4 days at a time rather than as a daily practice, or at least I will prep these at the same time and then work on them over the following days so it has more of a daily practice feel.

I hear a lot of people say that they have started 100 days but given up halfway through. It must be a personality thing but I can’t see this ever happening to me. If I commit to something I will always see it through and I HATE having unfinished projects (though of course I do have some and they eat away at me!).

I was inspired to partake in my first 100 Days after seeing the finished projects from other quilters who had taken part. A bit like with temperature quilts there are just so many different and original ways to approach this.

In fact there is so much of interest here that I have decided to put together a new lecture called ‘The 100 Days Project For Quilters’ at this year’s Festival of Quilts (and thereafter as a zoom lecture to guilds and groups).

Tickets are now for sale for this presentation and my other lecture ‘Simple Modern Quilting Live’(and for all Festival of Quilts activities hence the badge above with beautiful artwork by my pal Daisy Aschehoug who is having a gallery this year!). Just click on the button below and search ‘Jo Avery’.

FOQ lectures

I’m also teaching a class on Stitch Wanderings however it sold out within 24 hours of release!

I haven’t done much about the new lecture yet other than interview Lindsay Jean Thomson who runs the project (and to get her blessing for it - thanks Lindsay!). I will be approaching quilters soon once we get The Thread House Academy year 4 launched.

It’s not too late to join in the 100 Days Project this year. Lindsay has a great Substack here with loads of tips and advice and you can start your 100 days at anytime.

All going well I’ll be posting about this again in June when all my 100 blocks will be finished!

Buy my New Book

Amazingly we are getting ready to launch our fourth year of online classes over at The Thread House Academy!

Every year we launch our new prospectus with a Free Taster Weekend. We each present an exclusive new tutorial so everyone can ‘try before they buy’ and get a feel for our teaching style and the way the Academy works.

For the last couple of years my classes have all been bird themed, including last year’s Mini Chicken Pouch and an exclusive Dream Birds Appliqué in 2024. I have returned to this subject again this year with a coin purse inspired by my Dream Birds!

I do like developing new ideas like this and I like any opportunity to add some lovely stitchy texture with embroidery embellishment. This little purse has a fully lined zipped pocket and can be made with tail or head feathers (or both if you like!).

This is going to be such a fun project to both teach and make. But I have to admit that the initial reason I designed this was out of necessity rather than inspiration.

A number of years ago I used to produce a kit to make my Birdy Pouch (yep, that’s right, yet another bird themed project!) which included a 10” zip. At some stage while ordering kit supplies and clearly not concentrating I mistakenly ordered a pack of 10cm zips instead!

Basically I have been trying to offload these tiny zips ever since and in the end I realised I needed to come up with a new design which would use them. The Dream Birds Coin Purse is the result! And it’s not just coins, you can use it for lipsticks, binding clips, stitch markers or sewing supplies.

I made the yellow and green one with tail feathers first and then branched out into the grey and orange one with head feathers and buttons for eyes.

The Taster Weekend is not until 25/26 April so I have plenty of time to make a few more before recording the class.

Meanwhile my Thread House partners Karen Lewis and Lynne Goldsworthy have both designed fabulous projects for their tutorials. Karen has cleverly devised this perfect travel set from a single piece of fabric that includes a folded sewing kit and a tool pouch.

And Lynne has designed a stunning cushion using tiny Dresden plates and stars that will introduce you to a whole range of techniques. You can read more about all three classes here.

We hope these sessions provide something for everyone and allow you to sample some of what's on offer in The Thread House Academy.

We have just opened our Sign-ups so if you would like to join us for the Taster Weekend then just click on the button below.

Taster Weekend Sign Up

All three tutorials are offered completely for FREE during the weekend. The classes are pre-recorded videos which will be available from Saturday 25th April at 10am BST until Monday night on the 27th (we allow access beyond the weekend so that those in timezones behind the UK can still have a whole weekend). You can watch them as often as you like during the weekend.

During the weekend you will also get access to our community platform so you can get the full Academy experience. If you like what you see and decide to sign up to our Academy Annual Plan or Term 1 then you get to keep lifetime access for all three tutorials! You will also be able to take advantage of our Launch Weekend 25% off discount for the passes too.

We will have supply lists and templates for the taster sessions available from 13th April. And around then we will also be revealing all the new classes we have planned for the year ahead. I can’t wait to show you what we have been working on!

Free Taster Session

What’s this? Another finished quilt! Yes that’s right, and a traditional quilt as well!

This is the first traditional quilt I’ve made in a very long time. And what I mean by traditional is that I had to use accurate templates and follow a pattern rather than my usual improv style. It happens to be my own pattern though which definitely helped!

10 years ago I made ‘New York Beauty Brigade’ for Today’s Quilter magazine (above) using a gorgeous fabric collection by Jennifer Paganelli for Free Spirit called Color Brigade (hence the name).

At that stage of my career I made quilts for magazines on a regular basis and really cut my teeth on quilt design and pattern writing during this period. I would then turn the best of these quilts into new workshops for my studio/store in Edinburgh, myBearpaw.

You don’t earn much money making magazine quilts but by making them dual purpose like this it became a viable business, especially (as with this quilt) the fabric was supplied by the manufacturer.

The original brief from the magazine editor was to produce a ‘show stopping’ quilt for their stand at Festival of Quilts that year and for the cover of the issue that came out the same month.

The New York Beauty pattern (so called because the spikes evoke the crown on the Statue of Liberty) had been a favourite of mine since I first saw it 35 years ago. Despite playing around with some early improv versions I was yet to make the classic quilt for myself but I knew this would have the impact the editor wanted.

For this quilt I chose a very simple version of the block and had lots of fun rotating it to get the most interesting effect from the curves. Despite having such impact it’s a surprisingly simple quilt to make with the same block repeated 64 times. The trick is to use the right fabric...

When my quilty BFF and Thread House business partner, Karen Lewis, showed me her latest fabric line for Andover Fabrics, ‘Friday Night’, I just knew that it would be perfect for a new
version of this quilt. The colour palette is so sophisticated and the wide variety of different prints is exactly what this exuberant pattern needs.

I rarely repeat myself when it comes to quilt making but this pattern is special and deserved my attention. This quilt had became one of my most popular quilts ever and I taught it as a class many times. Back in 2020 I released a number of my most iconic magazine quilts as standalone patterns but somehow (and stupidly) I missed this one.

Today the pattern is finally available to buy!

I actually finished the quilt before Christmas but only just got my act together to photograph it and update the pattern ready for release.

You can buy the PDF pattern NOW with an introductory offer of 25% off until Monday 9th March. No code necessary, the discount has already been applied.

Just click on the button below to go to my website

NYB PDF pattern

To complete this exciting collaboration Karen has produced kits to make my latest version of the quilt using her beautiful Andover Fabrics ‘Friday Night’ collection (pictured above). You can even choose which outer border fabric you’d like. And if you buy before 9th March you can save 10%!

Click on the button below to find out more

Quilt Kit

As I taught this class so often I made a LOT of NYB blocks. These became cushions or ended up in sampler style ‘orphan block’ quilts which I usually make for charity.

It’s been fun digging in my archive and finding all the different blocks and I think this is especially useful as inspiration for those quilters who want to make their own version of the quilt. So I have added them to the PDF pattern as a gallery.

The quilt was finished on my Handi Quilter MoxieXL long arm with a version of the interlocking rainbow pattern, this includes rows or petals surrounding the outer rainbows to mix things up a bit. I used Aurifil 40/3wt in off-white (2000) for the thread.

While I was making my recent Folk Art Dolls I wondered about using this beautiful fabric collection on one of the dolls. I tried this out a couple of weeks back (after the Liberty bird) and this new friend for my original fox appeared! The fabric works perfectly!

It’s good to know that all sorts of different fabrics work for the dolls and it’s encouraged me to experiment further. I’m thinking about a Tilda fabric doll next!

I’m off to the Scottish Quilting Show in Glasgow this week. I know only a tiny proportion of my readership will be able to make this show BUT you can all join me for the Instagram LIVE gallery tour I’ll be doing on Thursday at 4.30pm GMT (as long as you are signed up to Instagram that is!).

Not only will I take you around my gallery but we will also pop next door to The Golden Bobbins exhibition to see what they have been making. The Golden Bobbins are my quilting group and despite taking a sabbatical last year I do have a couple of pieces hanging on their stand.

Just head to my Instagram feed at 4.30pm on Friday and join me! I’ll also post it to my feed afterwards so you can catch up with it at your convenience too.

Monthly Trees is my temperature quilt for 2025. I shared in-progress quilting images of this quilt on my Moxie long arm in a recent post here. I finished the quilting soon after and attached a scrappy binding.

As usual with the Scottish winter I’ve had to bide my time between the rain and gloom to take quilt photos but I finally managed it a few days ago.

At the start of 2025 I had not thought of a plan for that year’s temperature quilt. I knew I would make one (I just can’t see a year when I wouldn’t do this now) but inspiration hadn’t struck. I was busy with preparations for my forthcoming gallery at FOQ and new classes for The Thread House Academy. And I was also deep into my ‘moon tree’ obsession. In fact this was the subject of my first ever post here on Substack.

The Thread House Academy involves two Zoom sessions every month with our Term or Annual Pass members. This is a chance for students to ask us questions and ‘show and tell’ their projects, not just from Academy classes but anything at all they would like to share.

Around about this time last year one of our members, Alison, shared her new temperature quilt which was a large tree block with 12 branches. Each branch had a month’s worth of tiny appliqué leaves, the colours of each depicted the highest temperatures of each day of the month (these had to be raw edge appliqué due to the size). This meant that Alison could get a whole year’s worth of temperature leaves on to one tree.

As soon as I saw Alison’s tree a light bulb went on above my head. Of course… Temperature Trees!! Duh! Why hadn’t I thought of that?!! Huge thanks to Alison for the initial spark.

Before I talk more about my temperature tree quilt I must finish explaining about Alison’s. Her plan was to track temperatures from different places around the world for the same year and create a tree for each. But how to choose the locations?

Wombles of course!! She used the names of the different Wombles (Bulgaria, Orinoco, Tomsk etc.) for her global temperature trees! How delightfully eccentric!! And the best temperature quilt idea I have ever heard! And for those of you outside the UK saying ‘what on earth are Wombles?’ have fun googling!!

Back to my temperature quilt and I decided that one tree per month would work perfectly and allow the leaves to be large enough that I could use needle turn appliqué. I decided to use my freehand cutting method to create the trees, which I was constantly exploring with my Moon Trees at this time. I also decided that I would use just the highest degree every day for the first time.

The leaves travel around the tree in order going up and down the branches. The 1st of the month is bottom left and last day is bottom right.

The blocks ‘snake’ left to right in rows with January top left and December bottom right of the quilt.

I started on the January tree in March last year with historical data from Weather Underground. I made things easy for myself by using the same mix of fabrics I had used for my 2024 Temperature Fabric Book. This meant I didn’t even need to create a new fabric key. The fabrics are a mix of Essex Linen, Manchester and Fableism Sprout.

It took until September for me to finish the February block. I just had no spare time for this project until FOQ was out of the way. I spent the Autumn catching up with all the months and finished the last tree early in January this year.

My dear friend and Thread House partner Karen Lewis created these screen printed temperature quilt ‘legends’ (above) for the first time this year and gifted one to me.

Apart from being a talented screen printer Karen is almost as addicted to temperature quilts as I am so these are perfect panels for her to produce!

I pieced the panel numbers with tiny pieces of all the fabrics I had used to create this ‘legend’ and then pieced it into the back of my quilt.

I’m very happy with my ‘kissing leaf’ FMQ pattern which you can read more about in this post. I’m actually very happy with the quilt all together!

This will be hanging alongside all my other temperature quilts at my Scottish quilting Show exhibition in a couple of weeks time. Well hopefully ‘all’ my other temperature quilts as one of them is currently hanging at QuiltCon in Raleigh USA currently! Fingers crossed it gets returned to me in time.

Thanks to Karen and another quilty friend, Vera, I have some photos to share of my 3 quilts hanging at the show. I have been glued to Instagram over the last few days devouring all the posts from those attending the show who are sharing the many stunning quilts hanging. Wow, the standard of work is incredible! I feel very honoured to have my quilts included amongst them.

And despite the rampant FOMO I have been comforting myself by being creatively productive at home instead of being at QuiltCon. In fact I have started a new tree inspired quilt!

This is the finished top. Keen followers will recognise the same techniques I used for my Poplars quilt (and online class) but I have taken things a step further by piecing and curving my tree trunks. I’ve now started to add the branches of these winter trees using hand quilting with Aurifil 8wt thread.

That’s the plan anyway, it’s all experimental but that’s the way I like it.

If you would like to explore temperature quilts in more depth then just a reminder that my self-published book, ‘Journey to the Centre of a Quilter’, has a whole chapter on temperature quilts, and features all of my temperature projects so far (including the fabric book and embroidery).

It also includes a resources page and a project to get you started! You can buy my book direct from my website using the button below.

Buy my book

And here is a special DISCOUNT CODE for my blog readers - get 20% off the book using this code quiltconsoldout20. I created this code earlier today for a customer who had wanted to buy my book from Morris Textiles booth at QuiltCon but they have already SOLD OUT!

I felt bad for them as now the only option will be to order direct from me and incur international shipping fees (Morris Textiles are having a sabbatical after QuiltCon so won’t be restocking) so I thought 20% off might help.

So why not offer this little treat to all of you?! Enjoy and I will keep it going for the next week at least

!

I don’t want to add to the constant complaints about the weather in the UK this winter but the endless grey skies and rain did start to get me down a few weeks back. Surviving the Scottish winter sometimes feels like living in a cave and it can be hard to stay motivated and cheerful.

In the end I just decided to give in and try hibernation instead. This has involved me starting a number of new hand sewing projects while listening to a lot of podcasts and audio drama and staying warm and snuggly inside.

And it actually worked, I kept my sanity through the worst and in the last few days the weather has improved and spring feels just around the corner!

And now I have many lovely projects to share with you today…

Dream Bird Family Portraits is an idea I have been percolating for a while. My Dream Bird patterns were released two years ago and are still incredibly popular.

But in my head I kept wanting to put the birds into an ornate picture frame. I’m imagining them as portraits of beloved ancestors which adorn the staircases of their country houses.

I created five of these framed portraits, three are still in progress. My plan is to mount these on A4 boards and sell them as mini original textile artworks at my forthcoming exhibition at the Scottish Quilting Show in Glasgow next month.

If they prove popular I can always make more for a future shop update. I’d love to know your thoughts on them! Are they too insane even for me?!

At QuiltCon in 2019 I attended a workshop with Timna Tarr on making quilt maps. I started a large map of our 7 acres of re-wilded woodland which we call ‘Shangri la Farm’.

It was of course all needle-turn appliqué and I only ever got a small amount finished. Years went by while it languished in a bag…

Since 2019 we have changed so much of the depicted land, including completely rebuilding our house, and that meant I lost the motivation to find it and finish it.

I found my sample the other day by accident and decided to cut my losses, literally. I cut the map down to the bit I had completed and started adding randomly shaped pieces of scrap fabric. I then started stitching all over it in the style of my recent Stitch Wanderings.

I am going to call this a Map Wandering and will continue to work on it now until it is a pleasing piece of textile art with a vague ‘map vibe’.

Meanwhile The Thread House Academy rolls on month after month and up next is our final class of the year, Karen’s Folk Garden Quilt.

I have been such a fan of this design since Karen first showed Lynne and I over a year ago. My first introduction to appliqué was this sort of mola inspired reverse appliqué back in the early 1990’s. In fact the first class I ever taught was this subject to my local quilt group at the time.

I really love Karen’s design aesthetic and the simple but effective motifs she draws. So as soon as she had finished her template sheet I used elements from her full sized design to make this smaller panel (which is about 16”).

This was a lovely, soothing project to work on. I used the beautiful Artisan Cotton from Windham Fabrics along with Aurifl 8wt cotton. I haven’t decided yet whether this will be a pillow or a wall hanging.

Folk Garden Quilt single class is now for sale and can be bought by clicking on the button below. The class goes live on March 1st.

Folk Garden Quilt

In other Thread House Academy news we have just announced the date for this year’s Free Taster Weekend. This is when you get to ‘try before you buy’ with 3 exclusive tutorials which are available to watch over the weekend of 25/26 April. This is also when we launch our prospectus for the year ahead with an early bird discount.

I will share more info next month (including the subject of my class!) but for now just save that date!

Now for that freebie I promised…

Nic of Craftapalooza has come up with a wonderful idea to collaborate through newsletters. She is teaming up with a different creative every month to do a sort of introduction swap. Basically I tell you all about her and she introduces me to her readers.

Nic Vaughan is the designer behind Craftapalooza Designs, based in Perth, Australia. Nic is known for handwork-forward patchwork with a big love for applique, hand piecing, and slow stitching, all in the name of “stitching glimmers of joy into patchwork and quilts”.

As part of our collaborative share, Nic is bringing her free Tea for Me quilt block to you. The sample shown was stitched using needle turn appliqué, but you can use any appliqué method you love, including fusible or machine appliqué. Download the free PDF, pop the kettle on, and settle in for some cosy stitching. Click the link in the button below, enter your details, and the pattern will be emailed straight to you.

Tea For Me

I do hope you will enjoy getting to know more about Nic through her website and newsletters!

I will leave you with yet another folk art doll. Well you didn’t think I’d be able to stop making these did you?!

I had a sudden urge to try one using printed fabric so delved into my vast stash of Liberty tana lawn to make this sweet little bird. She came out a bit smaller and thinner then her brothers and sisters but just as cute!

My addiction to recording daily temperatures using textiles continues with a new quilt. In fact I am planning two new temperature quilts this year, a daily one and a ‘fast’ one. The fast one will use historic data from the year and location of my birth (London 1966). I have a special birthday this year and so this is a way to commemorate it. I will start this in the summer.

The daily quilt is called Handloom Blooms and is all hand stitched needle turn appliqué. The idea is to create a giant flower for each month with the petals marking each day. Each petal has an outer section (lowest temperature) and an inner section (highest temperature).

The image above is the finished block for January. The centre circles are the average lowest and highest temperatures for the whole month.

I’ve chosen a brand new collection of fabric to use exclusively for this quilt. It’s Handloom by Tara Faughnan for Windham Fabrics. It’s not actually in stores until May but Windham kindly sent me a FQ of each SKU.

The fabric feels very similar to Manchester, though maybe a little crisper. I love Manchester fabric (by Robert Kaufman) and use it all the time, but Kaufman have discontinued it so I only have my stash to work with. I have been praying that someone would bring out a similar fabric, so thank you Windham!

I’m working with Jo at A Beautiful Thing to curate a new bundle of the Handloom that will be available as a pre-order very soon (for those of you in the UK).

This is such a large collection with so many beautiful shades (65 in total!)! It’s perfect for a temperature quilt. I have also chosen 12 different neutral fabric for the monthly background from this same range.

The WIP image above shows the first 22 days, which is 2 layers of petals. Jan 1st is top right here (top left in finished image). The petals travel clockwise around in 3 rows, overlapping each other.

I was very much feeling my way with this first one. I did create a pattern which I traced over but there was still some fudging to be done. Now I have the first month finished I will be able to waste less fabric on the next one.

When I trace the flower for February I will simple leave out 3 of the outer petals (when it’s April I will just remove 1). As with my other improv/freehand temperature quilts, this way of avoiding quilt maths issues is the genius advantage with using this method.

Because of the nature of this design I won’t actually work on it in a ‘daily’ fashion but wait until half the month has gone by before stitching the first outer ring of petals all in one go. They are easier to place that way.

I’m excited about this new quilt and love the way the flower looks (despite all the blue fabric - it was a cold month here!).

Meanwhile I am busy quilting my Monthly Trees Temperature Quilt from 2025.

It’s on the Handi Quilter MoxieXL right now and I am using a pattern of ‘kissing’ leaves. I have used this sort of veined leaf patters for many years (even before I had a long and was using a domestic machine for FMQ) but usually they are trailing.

By using some extra ‘echoing’ around one side of the leaf I can nestle them close together, as if they are part of the forest floor.

This quilt will be part of my exhibition at The Scottish Quilting Show in Glasgow next month.

I always have a small stand to hang quilts, demo hand stitching and sell books etc. But this year I am getting a large stand to hang most of my exhibition from FOQ ‘Journey to the Centre of a Quilter’.

I will also be giving a FREE lecture every day (Thursday 5th to Saturday 7th March) all about the quilts in the exhibition. I will also be selling books, merch and original artworks. I do hope to see lots of quilty pals there!

Meanwhile if you’d like to explore temperature quilts a little more then my self-published book which accompanies the exhibition ‘Journey to the Centre of a Quilter’ has a whole chapter on temperature quilts, and features all of my temperature projects so far (including the fabric book and embroidery).

It also includes a resources page and a project to get you started! You can buy my book direct from my website using the button below. Or if you are in North America then Morris Textiles has stock currently which you can view here.

Buy My Book

The last couple of weeks have been taken up with filming the videos for my next online workshop with The Thread House Academy, Folk Art Dolls.

Making video classes is always quite stressful (much more stressful than teaching live weirdly) but the subject matter really helped this time as I was basically just playing with cute dolls all day. I spent most of my childhood sewing soft toys so it feels like I have come full circle with this class.

We start things off in the class with a basic ‘Dream Bird’ pattern. Not having fully stuffed limbs really helps with construction and provides a gentle intro for the first doll.

I made the bird doll above a couple of weeks back to try out the first templates and the doll below during the class.

Then we move onto more challenging dolls that encompass actual limbs to create cats, rabbits and ladies. Before the class I had only managed cats (I wrote about my Christmas Cat here) so was winging it a bit with the bunny ears. They turned out a bit larger than necessary (perhaps he is a hare?!).

Instead of a cat I thought I would try a fox and this turned out to be my most successful Folk Art Doll yet. I have fallen in love with Mr Fox and he now lives in my bedroom (that actually sounds a bit weird!).

He is much more ‘naturalistic’ than the other dolls (and has a tail!) but I think he is finally getting to the place I wanted to be with these ‘Art Dolls’. They have had a bit of a tortured journey since I started playing around with the idea 18 months ago. You can read about their birth in this post on my old blog here.

I would like to try making the fox again using printed fabric on his body, such as Liberty Tana Lawn. I am definitely planning more foxes, but of course no one can replace this original fox doll (who will stay in my bedroom!).

Next I turned my attention to creating the three Thread House tutors as Folk Art Dolls… myself, Lynne Goldsworthy and Karen Lewis.

I started with the ‘Jo’ doll ahead of the class. She is a bit of prototype and ended up a bit too small. Also I only worked out afterwards how to create long hair. I wanted to make all the mistakes on my own doll so as not too insult Karen and Lynne more than necessary!

So Karen and Lynne ended up a bit bigger and fatter than me which was COMPLETELY ACCIDENTAL! And in reality definitely the opposite case, at least the fatter bit!

But despite their voluptuous hips Karen and Lynne are very pleased with their personal dolls and I have promised not to use them for any dark magic ;).

Some of the dolls also have their own knitwear! I created cardigans for the cats and bunny using leftover sock yarn and an adapted pattern of the ‘Good Bear’ jacket from Barrett Wool Co. The designer Susan B Anderson has kindly given me permission to share my adapted pattern with students.

Finally the class deals with some ideas for themed dolls. I created a cute robin bird doll for Christmas and went through the many fun ideas I had used to create the Halloween dolls I’d made previously.

Overall I made 6 dolls during the class which takes my total tally to 17! Everyone was a joy to make and a lovely way to spend this dark cold part of the year (especially with the global news we have to deal with at the moment).

The Folk Art Doll online class goes live on Sunday and can be purchased now (so you can check out supplies and prep) or at any time. The Thread House Academy classes are pre-recorded videos with lifetime access (lifetime of the Academy). Click on the button below for more info.

Folk Art Dolls Class

I will leave you with an update on my Svalbard Stitch Wandering after sharing a WIP shot in my last post…

I’m very pleased I managed to include both a snowy owl and a ‘scandi style’ polar bear.

Early Bird Registration ends on Saturday, 31st January, for the Svalbard Retreat so do check out all the info by clicking on the button below.

Svalbard Retreat

And finally…

I am the latest guest on the Quilter on Fire Podcast with lovely Brandy Maslowski. This follows on from episodes with both Karen and Lynne. Those girls always make fun of me for being so chatty and it looks like they are right as this episode is 1 hour 45 minutes long! Yikes!

So if you have a long car ride ahead why not take it along!

Quilter on Fire Podcast

I wrote a post about my first ‘Stitch Wanderings’ back in November and since then I have continued to work on these 8” panels and experiment with different stitches and motifs. Yesterday I turned all the pieces into a new fabric book.

The ‘pages’ all include some simple needle turn appliqué shapes embellished with simple embroidery and more decorative stitching added alongside. Each one has been a little stitch journey into the unknown.

I used Aurifil 8wt cotton exclusively on these panels. I am really enjoying stitching with this at the moment.

I tried to find interesting background fabrics for these pieces, like this plaid above which is from Alison Glass’s Kaleidoscope Wovens collection. Some of the backgrounds are French Linens and some are from the Fableism range but all of them have some pattern rather than being a plain linen. I buy these sort of linen/woven fabrics whenever I see them so I have quite a selection to choose from.

In the ‘page’ above the appliqué shapes are nearly all made using Fableism fabrics included in my curated bundles which are available from A Beautiful Thing.

A Beautiful Thing Curated Fabric Bundles

I first started exploring these Stitch Wandering ideas in August with this experimental piece…

I took the Interlocking Square pattern that is a favourite FMQ design of mine and tried recreating it with appliqué and running stitch. This was a nice ‘loosener’ and though I didn’t pursue this particular groove it got me started with the more narrative panels. This piece also ended up in the book with a little added section to make it long enough to be a double page.

The first few panels were more minimalist with less stitching and more empty space. As I went along I got more ideas and added more texture. Not all the experiments were completely successful and I do like some of the panels much more than others but this is bound to happen if you are trying out new ideas.

I knew from early on that these experiments would be perfect for a fabric book. I like to think of my fabric books as ‘sketch books’ full of ideas I can come back to when I need some inspiration.

I created my first fabric book 3 years ago this month and I now have 16! Here are just some of them laid out…

The first few books were class samples for a Thread House Retreat. They proved so popular that ‘Keepsake Fabric Books’ became one of my first Thread House Academy online classes.

Last week we launched our first ever Half Price January Sale with 50% off single classes from our first two Academy Years. This includes Keepsake Fabric Book!

So if you fancy having a go yourself then head to the Sale page on our website and use the code 50SINGLE to get 50% off the class. Offer ends 18th January.

Online Class Half Price Sale

The Stitch Wanderings fabric book may be finished but I haven’t stopped working on my Stitch Wanderings. In fact I think they will form the basis for two new class projects that I am currently planning. I have now largely retired from in person teaching but I do have a couple of ‘last gigs’ coming up this year.

I’m very excited to be visiting Svalbard with Daisy Aschehoug of Warm Folk in November and teaching a full day class at her 2026 retreat. Svalbard seems like such a magical place to me especially in the arctic winter and Daisy’s retreat has so many interesting activities running alongside the sewing.

I am working on ideas for a Svalbard Stitch Wandering which will include all sorts of relevant aspects such as Norwegian folklore and folk art, snow covered mountains, polar bears, whales, owls and the Northern Lights. I have already had an initial attempt at this which became the back cover of the fabric book…

I have just started working on a larger panel. I’m excited to see what happens with this and am looking forward to encouraging my students to ‘wander with stitches’ in the class in November.

If you are interested in finding out more about Daisy’s retreat then click on the button below to go to her website and take advantage of early registration before 31st January.

Svalbard Retreat

In July my friend and host of the Quilter on Fire Podcast, Brandy Maslowski, will be bringing a group of North American Quilters on a 13 day Tour of Scotland followed by a visit to The Festival of Quilts.

I will be spending one of the Scottish days with the group as we visit one of my favourite places in the world, The Great Tapestry of Scotland! As well as guiding the group around the tapestry (I was one of the many stitchers involved in creating this iconic work of art) I will be teaching a short workshop at the Tapestry Centre. My plan is to design a mini Stitch Wandering inspired by aspects of the GTOS.

To find out more about the tour and book a place email: info@opulentquiltjourneys.com

It’s time for my annual review of the quilts I made in the last 12 months and I have to admit I thought there would be more! I felt like I made so many leading up to my Festival of Quilts exhibition but it’s actually about the same as last year.

There wasn’t even enough to fill a 9 image grid so I have created my own using Canva which works better due to the awkward, non-square shapes of Giant Trilobite and Jukebox. It also means I could get them more to scale.

There always tends to be a bit of an overlap with the years as I actually finished two more quilts in late 2025 but haven’t yet managed to photograph them (due to living too far north and it being mid winter!). I will share these once I can get some decent images. The same thing happened last year so in the end it all evens out, with two made in late 2024 included here as they weren’t revealed until 2025.

Two of the quilts here (Jukebox above and Witches Sabbat Temperature Quilt below) have been selected for QuiltCon in February, along with Doodlebug from last year’s quilts. I’ve never had more than one quilt juried in before so I was delighted to send 3 off this year! Unfortunately I won’t be attending the show in Raleigh but hopefully some of my readers will get to see them hanging in person.

2025 was an epic year in my quilting career with both a self-published book and my FOQ Gallery, Journey to the Centre of a Quilter.

I’m the sort of person that’s always moving forward and planning the next thing and don’t tend to look back much, so I’ve sort of forgotten everything that happened already! However if I do stop and think about it I am very proud of everything I achieved.

I am very busy again now with a new quilt. After a wonderful Christmas full of family warmth and laughter I’m very pleased to be back in my studio and working on a new modern quilt. It’s secret sewing though so I won’t be able to share anything with you for at least 6 months.

After FOQ I needed a bit of a break from making quilts but I’m pleased to say my sew-jo is now back with a vengeance! I have plans for at least 3 more quilts once this one is finished. AND I have two new temperature quilts to start in 2026 and last year’s to finish, so a lot to look forward to.

I hope you will all stick around and join me for another year of textile adventures. Happy New Year!

Buy my new book