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!!