The Tiny House in fabric!

I planned to post about this before my recent holiday, and definitely before Christmas, but I just ran out of time.

So now we are on 'the other side' (as I like to think of this rather relaxing time of year) I can finally write a post about my husband's Tiny House and my recent Today's Quilter BOM - yes I have managed to combine them both!!

As regular readers will know I am designing the TQ block of the month and it's all about my life 'in the country' with the blocks inspired by seasonal happenings here at Shangri la Farm.

Well December is a quiet time for flora and fauna so I thought it would be nice to highlight time spent indoors and this gave me an excuse to talk about my husband's burgeoning Tiny House Scotland business.

I was sure I had posted about the Tiny House before (it is such a big part of our lives!), but I can only find mentions here and there with a promise to write a full post when it is finished (fail!).

Well it is very definitely finished and Jonathan is now working on his first commission with more lined up waiting.

You can read more about it and see photos of the interior on his website gallery and on his Facebook page (where annoyingly he has way more 'likes' than the myBearpaw page!). You may recognise a few of the interior textiles in the photos 😉.

When I wrote the Tiny House block of the month I thought it would be nice to give Jonathan's business a little publicity (of course this was secondary to producing a nice block!) but little did I know that by the time it came out he would already be all over the news!!

This is due to his involvement with the Social Bite Village - a wonderful initiative to provide Tiny House accommodation for 20 homeless people in Edinburgh which is due for completion later in 2017.

Edinburgh council have donated the land and a team of builders and architects (with Jonathan as the designer - NB he won't be building them all!) are assisting the amazing Josh Littlejohn to bring this landmark project to fulfillment.

The video below from BBC Scotland gives a nice summary of the important points. Here is a collection of the media coverage this achieved a few weeks back. And if you would like to support this very worthwhile cause then here is a link to the Just Giving page for donations.



When this was all kicking off I had a visit from my good friend and quilter Sarah who came up with the brilliant (though rather obvious!) idea of making a quilt for each of the homeless people for when the houses are ready!

SO... next year I will be initiating a quilt drive for 20 quilts, and hopefully making this an annual event, as the idea is that after a year in a Tiny House they will be ready to move into permanent homes making room for more homeless folks in the Social Bite village.

How lovely would it be to provide each of them a quilt, handmade just for them, so that they knew that people really cared about them no matter what their circumstances?

No need to do anything yet, I don't have room to store stuff at the moment, but don't worry you will all hear about it when the call goes out!!



I will leave you with the variation block from the BOM. This is an interpretation of our 'Tiny Barn' made by Jonathan last year for extra storage (and so he could turn our big barn into his Tiny House building area!).

Now I am off to design month seven of the BOM, hmmm... I wonder what it will feature?!
You can probably tell that I am absolutely LOVING designing this BOM!!

The Thread House Pattern Launch and GIVEAWAY!!

Our The Thread House patterns are now ready to purchase! You can check them all out here.

Right get ready for some serious quilting eye candy...

We are so pleased with our first six patterns! We hope you like them too. At present you can only buy them as a download but paper patterns will be coming soon!

Let's take a look at them all...

This is Karen's Giant Hexie cot quilt. I think this was the first pattern she ever wrote and she has revived it and re-made it in her beautiful Blueberry Park fabric.

And this is Karen's Summit Quilt, a brand new design, love the colour placement. The whole thing is so simple yet so striking!

Next up is Lynne's Pic'n Mix Sampler Quilt, which is amazing value for money, with four different versions included! My husband loves this quilt and wants to keep it for himself :)

You probably recognise some of the backdrops featured. We are so lucky that my very talented husband, Jonathan, offered to do the quilt photography for us. He took all these gorgeous photos using Shangri La Farm and his Tiny House as locations, aren't they amazing?!

Our lovely Gothic bench which was one of Jonathan's first fabric designs from around 20 years ago, is the fabulous setting for Lynne's Cube Quilt, which is just stunning!

And of course there are my patterns which we already looked at in great detail in my two previous posts!

To celebrate our launch I am giving away a copy of each of my patterns on both this blog and IG. And Karen and Lynne are also doing the same thing with their patterns (though not necessarily at the same time as Karen is in Rome!!) so check out their IG accounts and blogs!

Just leave a comment below telling me which quilt you like best out of the six featured above (you don't need to say one of mine, just be honest, I can take it!!).

For an extra entry then share this post on some other form of social media (your own blog, facebook page, twitter etc.) and leave me an extra comment here telling me you've shared it.

If you are on Instagram then head over and enter the giveaway there to double your chances!

Giveaway is open to International entries and closes midnight on Sunday (4th September). Remember if you are a 'no-reply commenter' then you will need to leave your email in your comment.

Good luck everyone! And don't forget to check out all the patterns on our website!

Rainbow Wheel Quilt

Back in the spring I was very busy making quilts for magazines and now a whole bunch of them are being published at the same time and I can finally show them off! So expect plenty of finished quilt posts over the summer.

First up is my Rainbow Wheel Quilt featured in Love Patchwork and Quilting magazine, issue 37, which is out today.

Love that cover quilt by my good friend and Stitch Gathering teacher, Julie (Forest Poppy).

Plus those cute FPP dogs are by Juliet (Tartankiwi), another SG teacher whose coming all the way from New Zealand to teach. If you are not going to this year's retreat you can still take a class with Juliet at our studio in September. Check out Juliet's beautiful butterfly class here (and book while there are still places available!)

With this month's magazine comes this fantastic Kawaii Hexies supplement - how cute are they?! I've never seen anything like them before and I sense a new craze about to start (someone needs to do some Pokemon Go versions and then they'll really take off!). Even though they look ridiculously fiddly I still fancy having a go!

The idea for this quilt pattern came from this Scrappy Wheel cushion below. Last summer I spent some time using up old class samples and this was made from four 'Fan' blocks from my Modern Sampler course. The cushion was a big hit so I decided that a full sized quilt would be a good idea.

I chose a limited palette (for me!) of turquoise, pink, orange and yellow and went through my giant scrap bag for suitable pieces for the 'fans'. I decided on a dark background for a change, one of my favourite fabrics, Kaufman's Spot On in Pepper.

I extended the scrappyness into the 'piano key' border, including scraps made out of the background fabric to break it up a bit. I think the 'floating' strips of colour make the whole thing look a bit more modern.

And then I decided to have another go at an overall feather pattern for the free-motion quilting (I've only used this once before, on my feather quilt and that was two years ago!) but this time with added 'echo'. I chose a variegated turquoise thread (Aurifil 50 as always) and it's had quite an unusual effect, giving extra texture to the background especially.

I wasn't sure about it to start with (the variegated thread effect). I thought it looked a bit like the quilt had gone mouldy! But now I think it gives it a more velvety look.

I forgot to take a photo of the backing (these photos were done before it got sent away) and I can't remember what I used now! So that will be a nice surprise when it comes back to me.

I think this quilt is going to live in the Tiny House my husband has built. He has taken my Squaring the Circle quilt for styling the sleeping loft in his photography, but it could do with being a shade bigger to fit the bed. This quilt is 69in square.

I plan to post all about the Tiny House once it's completely finished (bathroom still to go), but in the meantime you can see it here.

Summer Garland Applique

I've been a bit busy over the last week getting ready for a weekend of celebration for my 50th birthday (which is actually tomorrow). I had a fab time at my party on Saturday with lots of family and friends coming to visit and general merriment (and of course Karaoke!!)!

The weather was also amazing! I was very lucky, as Scotland in June can be very hit and miss.

We have been outside in the sunshine practically the whole time and I managed to get a few photos of my Summer Garland Applique cushion. This is the second in a series of four seasonal patterns for Today's Quilter.

The pattern is in the latest issue (12). Here it is alongside the Spring version, and photographed outside my husband's Tiny House which is nearly finished!

This was the star of the show at my birthday party, with Jonathan doing guided tours all night! You can read more about the Tiny House here, and I promise to share more photos when it is finished (just the bathroom to go now!), but for now here it is complete with deck...

...and here's a sneaky peek inside where the Spring cushion lives permanently.

I am currently enjoying a few days off (with my husband planning a surprise day out for us tomorrow) and embracing my next half century!

Next up on my to do list - the Autumn Garland applique!!

Lone Star Rising Quilt

I'm delighted to be sharing my Lone Star Rising quilt with you today!
I made this quilt at the beginning of the year for Quilt Now magazine. It is the first Lone Star I have made and I totally fell in love with the pattern. I can see a few more Lone Star quilts in my future!

There are quite a few off-centre Lone Stars around but most of them knock off just one or two of the arms. I decided to knock off 4 arms and place my star right up in the top left corner. When I put it there it reminded me of the way I used to draw a sun when I was tiny. So then it became a rising sun, hence the title Lone Star Rising.

It's also a bit of an homage to Carolyn Friedlander as I used fabrics from her 'Doe' line for the star, a crosshatch from 'Architextures' for the background and one from 'Botanics' for the binding! There's a plain black and white gingham on the back as it seems like quite a masculine quilt and I didn't want the back to spoil that!

I was very happy to see that it made the cover too, albeit as an inset (that main cover quilt totally deserves the limelight!).

And they did some lovely shots inside too.

Here it is on my own bed. It's pretty big (for my quilts anyway!) at 71 inches square, and my husband's a big fan of this one, so I think it might end up staying here when it's returned to me.

I always forget to talk about the thread I use, I am pretty much exclusively using Aurifil 50 for both piecing and quilting these days. One of the things I love most about it for quilting is that you get so much more on a bobbin than regular cotton, meaning less ends to thread in later!

I used this pale green shade (5017) that I bought from Sheila at last year's Stitch Gathering. Sheila sells Aurifil online if you are looking for some. I would thoroughly recommend it.

There was quite a bit of negative space on this quilt which is good for showing off some fancy FMQ. I decided to go for an overall design and not get too fancy, so I quilted 4 different leaves in a trailing pattern. I love doing leaves so this was easy but lots of fun and I think a bit different. Nominally they are holly, oak, beech and sycamore, but don't look too closely, they are not botanically correct!

I hope you get a chance to see the magazine and the way I have tackled the piecing. I think I came up with a neat, quick, strip-piecing method that takes the fiddles out of this design. The size of the diamonds means it grows pretty quickly too.

This last shot is taken against our new mini barn that my husband built. It's the perfect backdrop to photograph my quilts!
You can see more shots of the barn (during and after construction) and his design ideas for Tiny Houses here.