Monthly Trees Temperature Quilt

A first quilt finish for 2026

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.

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

!