Jo Avery – the Blog

Conkers Quilt

Many of my loyal readers will have heard me talk about The Thread House. This is the new quilt retreat and pattern venture I started earlier in the year along with my two partners Karen Lewis and Lynne Goldsworthy.

Well it’s nearly time for us to release our first patterns!

The launch is scheduled for tomorrow 1st September and you’ll be able to download any of our first 6 patterns as a digital pdf for only £5! Over the next few weeks we will start offering paper patterns too (proposed priced £7.99). We’ll also be giving away copies of our patterns, both on our blogs and on IG. More on this soon.

                        
I’ve been sharing images of my two Thread House quilts as WIP’s on Instagram but this is the first time I have published the finished quilts. So this is Conkers, the first of the two (I’ll keep the second for a separate post).
I’ve always loved quilt designs that include curves and spikes and the pickle dish pattern ticks all the boxes, but it’s fiddly and requires cutting from templates.
After playing around with the block I discovered that I could represent the pattern with a few simple elements: New York Beauty quarters, squares and half-square triangles. The design has an almost 3-D effect with the green ‘dishes’ and pink squares floating on a trellis background.
The pickle dishes remind me of conkers emerging from their casing, hence the name.

The NYB quarters do take a little time and practice but once they’re done the whole quilt comes together very quickly!

I had been given the Angela Walters book ‘Shape by Shape’ for my birthday (by my pal and fellow quilter Tatyana!). It’s the first FMQ book I’ve ever owned and is really excellent! I used some of Angela’s pattern ideas on this quilt like the feather below.

I spent a lot of time quilting this one and I am really pleased with the texture. In fact I am really pleased with the whole quilt, it might be my best yet!

If you are interested in finding out more about our patterns or downloading a copy you can sign up for our newsletter here. We’ll be sending an email once the patterns are ready to go!

I’ll also be blogging about it with the giveaway attached!

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