Big Changes at my Shop!

If I have seemed a little distracted and not especially productive recently here's the reason why...

Those of you who've visited our Edinburgh store recently will have noticed that things are changing. We have been selling off all our homewares and gifts stock and concentrating solely on our myBearpaw brand of craft classes, fabric, wool and haberdashery. And now we are moving too! The old premises are too big for us now and not entirely suitable to our new needs.

Don't worry we're not moving far, but as final details haven't been confirmed yet you will have to wait a little longer to find out exactly where. We hope you can all be patient while we finish our transformation!
Hopefully we will be ready to open again at Easter or just after.
Meanwhile our last trading day is this Saturday 29th March, and we still have a few last minute bargains to snap up, including lots of old Jonathan Avery shelf units and islands that would love a good home and are now as little as £25 each!
There's also still time to stock up on fabric and wool before we need to pack it up for a while.
Our website will keep running throughout so please feel free to order online whilst the shop is closed, and our new term of craft classes will be ready to book in April.
A big thank you to all our lovely Homestore customers who've stuck with us over the last 11 years in Morningside, we do hope you'll follow us on to our next adventure!

So it's goodbye Avery Homestore and hello myBearpaw from next week!!

Apologies for the copy and pasted info (from our newsletter) but I wanted to make sure I reached as many people as possible with news of our last day trading, and it's been too long a day to re-write it for the blog!

Using up my class samples again...

I have been very busy with my workshops over the last few months. Most classes involve a degree of class prep plus I quite ofter produce a block during the class. So on Monday I had a great time using up some of my class samples and making them in to useful items.
I have also managed to finish a quilt! But I am saving it for the Blogger's Quilt Festival which starts a week on Friday, so you will have to wait till then to see it.

But I will tell you now that it is made with lots of polka dots and I used some of my scraps to make this Dresden Plate block, which was the sample for the class I did last Sunday. It just makes it look a bit more interesting having the prongs pieced too.

This piece of Circa fabric seemed perfect for the centre and then I couldn't help adding some hand quilting in different coloured perle 8's.

Making this reminded me of a cushion I made about 4 years ago, when this blog was in it's infancy and no one was reading it! It just goes to show that my love of heavy hand quilting over florals with added buttons has been going on for a really long time!
I didn't know about perle cotton number 8's then so I used stranded cotton. And the fabrics were from my long standing Kaffe Fassett collection along with scraps of denim from old jeans.

I loved this cushion so much that I started to make a quilt version. Alas it is still languishing at the bottom of my UFO pile, that level of hand quilting was just too much, even for me!

Over the last 8 weeks I have been teaching an evening class for my Modern Sampler Quilt. I have been making a block along with the class each week so that I can make a second version of the quilt (and it can go in the 'to quilt' pile along with the first one!).

But for some weeks I needed to make a block before the class as well as during (to make sure my method was going to work!), like this Chunky Crosses block (that's just what I call it - does anyone have a better name?).
So this has ended up as a cushion which is already for sale in the shop along with the Dresden one at the top (I really do have enough cushions at home!).

Here are the backs. Lovely Essex Yarn Dyed in black for the Dresden and an old piece of Cath Kidston stripe for the other one.



Week 6 of the MSQ evening class is this unusual Dresden Plate, which I think I am going to call Dresden Village (after a suggestion from someone on Instagram). You make this using an Easy Dresden ruler, which means that you end up with smaller wedge shaped scraps left over.

So I sewed these together and got a smaller, pointier version. Which has now turned in to a tote bag!

We've just got in some new fabric from UK manufacturer Dashwood Studio, And that tortoise print was absolutely perfect to use with this block.

Here is the back - another new dashwood print.

And of course I had to add some buttons too. The middle one fits so perfectly that it doesn't even look like a button!

Here is the tortoise fabric in all it's glory - I just love it!

But this Petite Street Grey Flowers is my favourite. They are very keenly priced at £12 a metre or £2.80 for a FQ of a yard and you can check them all out on our website or in our Edinburgh shop.

Plus we have put together a bundle of 8 fat quarters for only £19.99, including some of 'Flurry' a new Dashwood dotty fabric that Lynne has recently used for this stunning quilt, and which costs just £10.80 a metre!

I am taking a short holiday starting on Friday so don't expect to hear from me again until...

Fun with yo-yos!

I've never had much time for yo-yos before. I didn't like the way they were put together in quilts (or I guess they are coverlets strictly speaking) with the gaps between the circles. Who wants holes in their quilts?

But then last Monday I was desperate for a quick easy project to show as my 'demo' at the Bearpaw Craft Club. This is one of those 'rod for your own back' situations - I had this great idea for a monthly craft club at our shop where people could come along and hang out and do their crafty stuff whilst chatting with others. I would provide cake and a quick demo of a crafty technique.
Well the club has become very popular and by month 4 I have run out of ideas for demos!

So I called my genius colleague Sarah (who was manning the shop that day) and said,

"what shall I do?" 

"What about yo-yos?" she said.

I have to admit I was a bit dismissive (see above) but, as I had nothing better to offer, I had a go.

And guess what? 

I LOVE yo-yos now!!

I drew round a CD and made a pile of them from new lovely Denyse Schmidt's Florence fabric that just came in...

...you can buy this bundle of Fat Quarters or Fat Eighths on our website - yum!
Plus a few others from Marcus Brother's The Next Wave that we have in our Edinburgh Store.
And instead of sewing them together I appliqued them on to wonderful Essex Yarn Dyed Linen in Flax.

Then I added some wadding and hand quilted a ring around each yo-yo with different coloured perle cotton number 8, and made this into a pillow. Voila!
The whole thing took about 3 hours, was very satisfying and went down really well with my Bearpaw Clubbers.
Now I want to sew yo-yos on to everything!

New craft kits and The Sweet Life is here!

A few months back I showed you some EPP hexies and suggested I had a plan for them. Well I had decided to produce a cushion cover kit for hand sewers, and though I finished the cushion ages ago, producing the kit feels like I have actually had to give birth to it!

I think it's because I have so much else going on at the moment, but anyway, it is finally here. You can buy it online or at our Edinburgh shop and it contains all fabric, wadding, DMC perle number 8 threads, needle, full instructions and 3 sheets of paper templates, and costs £14.99.

Or you can buy a copy of the excellent Homemade with Love magazine for Aug/Sept as it is a featured project in here.

Another 'new delivery' this week is a kit for the Garden Shed Wall Hanging made with Cori Dantini's new The Sweet Life fabric line (which is here in store now, more below!)

This is the first time I've done a quilt kit, and it is much easier to put together then a fancy-stitched cushion! The kit contains enough fabric for quilt top and binding along with full instructions, and costs £34.99.

Or you can download the FREE pdf and buy your own fabric and make it anyway.
Yes, The Sweet Life fabric is finally here, in stock in the shop and listed online!



It's absolutely gorgeous and a wonderful addition to any of last year's Beauty is You that you have left, or are hoarding!

We've put together fat quarter and fat eighths bundles with 11 fabrics each.

Plus this incredible 'made for adventure' panel which we are selling per 60cm panel for £8.99.

Now it's time for the Stitch Gathering countdown - less than a week to go and we are all getting so excited!

Scottish Modern Quilt Exhibition

For those of you who can't make it along to our Scottish Modern Quilt Exhibition I thought I would share these photos that my husband, Jonathan, took after he had finished the mammoth task of hanging them on Friday (thanks Jonathan!). I took the last 3 to highlight particular things he had missed.

This is actually my classroom, striped bare and filled with quilts, cushions and a few bags.
Not only are there many quilts here that I am sure you recognise but also you may have even contributed to some of them, like Frida on the left here...

...or Katy's amazing Stitch Tease Bee quilt above in the window.

This is our little 'hub' with info about the exhibition and about modern quilting.

We've squeezed a quilt on to every available wall, so that we can show more than 40 quilts and over 60 items altogether!

I've been getting lots of visitors from all over and the reaction has been extremely positive.

We've also been asking visitors to vote for their favourite quilt and I will be giving a prize to the winner!

This is the display above our till area with the amazing MUM's recipe quilt, made for this Edinburgh based charity using fabric from Malawi (the charity helps mothers and children in Malawi) and images from the book 'When the Rains Come' (which was written for the charity) by 2 ladies from Edinburgh. We have been selling lots of tickets and also books to help them.

Here's a close-up of the cushion and bag display. Somebody might recognise that very cute pouch...

and a few of the patchwork cushions!

Here's some mini quilts that have been swapped in Brit Quilt and Fab Little Quilt Swaps. Maybe some of the makers of these lovelies are reading this today?!

This last photo is to show you 2 of my favourites, Lynz's Marcelle Medallion and Sarah's Staind II.
There are probably a few other quilts that have been missed and you can of course visit the exhibition in person, it is on until August 25th as part of the Edinburgh Fringe.
If you'd like to read all the info from the exhibition it is available here

Busy doing nothing

I seem to be always busy but not getting much done at the moment!
I think it's down to a particularly heavy class schedule in May. I don't really have anything finished to show you and not much prospect of it in the near future!

But I don't want you all to forget about me and I miss our little chats if I'm away from the blog too long, so I thought you might like to see what I call my 'procrastination craft'.
This is another wool-eater blanket, I made one of these before here. It is a pattern by the very talented Sarah London (a trip to her blog is always fantastic colour therapy) which you can download for free here.

I started this off last September as a demonstration piece for a crochet class. I did 7 rows, each in a different shade of Sublime Silk Cashmerino DK, and then stopped and thought about making it in to a cushion. I even chose the backing. But it just sat there. And then, in a moment of distraction, I picked it up, found the wool I had started with and crocheted another row. And then another row. And then another row.
This pattern is just so addictive! So now it's going to be a blanket. I am going to add one more row each of the 7 colours and see if it looks big enough. That's if I can afford to buy that much wool, it's not called wool-eater for nothing!
The sublime wool is just so gorgeous to work with, really bouncy and has this silk sheen that almost glitters. The shades have really evocative names like Carrot, Caterpillar, Pineapple, and Pippin.

As my crafting becomes ever more associated with my business it can sometimes feel like a chore. So when there's something I know I should be doing but I don't really feel like it, I slope off and do some wool-eater instead. Hence 'procrastination craft'.

One more little thing I have managed to produce this week. I've been doing some good old EPP hexies. I have a cunning plan for this flower and I hope to show you something finished very soon!