Big News for 2020 – The Stitch Gathering SchoolHouse!

I have big news about my plans for 2020! This year I will be moving my main teaching studio from our Edinburgh store to a new building at Shangri la Farm we were live!

As many of you will know my husband, Jonathan, builds Tiny Houses at Tiny House Scotland. We have our own NestHouse which he built as a prototype and which we use as a show home for the Tiny Houses and extra accommodation for guests.  Last November he had an unexpected gap in his schedule and I am jumped at the chance to fill it!

Jonathan is now building me a Tiny House SchoolHouse!

Here is the plan! It will sit right next to our existing NestHouse with a covered pouch between them, meaning students can use it’s toilet and dining area.

It will be 10 years this summer since we moved to Shangri la Farm and I have always hoped that I could build a studio here that would enable me to offer a really special teaching experience to my students. But I always thought I would need a much larger building, with a kitchen area, toilet and my own sewing space.  The cost of this has always been too prohibitive so it’s been put on the back burner.

But my genius idea to use the facilities in our existing NestHouse means the teaching studio can fit inside one of Jonathan’s NestPod models.

It will sit to the left of the NestHouse as you see it above. There will be generous space for 6 students on machine sewing classes or 8-10 for hand sewing classes. My idea is for a longer workshop day which will include a delicious lunch which we can eat in the NestHouse or SchoolHouse (depending on numbers) or at a picnic outside (dependent on weather), an afternoon ‘Fika‘ break and a ‘tree tour’ around Shangri la Farm to finish the day. We have spent the last 9 years planting thousands of trees and re-wilding our plot to encourage wildlife. We now have proper woodland and a beautiful habitat and I can’t wait to share this with my students! We are based near Linlithgow and have great transport links with the M9 just minutes away and a train station in the town.

All of this means I making some really big changes to my working life. I have decided the time has come to put the myBearpaw part of my business up for sale. This blog will not be affected but my Edinburgh store, teaching studio and online store will all be passed on to someone else.  I would love that person to be someone from my local quilting community and am now starting to put the word out there to anyone who thinks they might be interested. It’s a fantastic business with loads of potential and I have an amazing manager, Jane, who runs everything like clockwork.  I would love to be able to still teach there on occasion and to work together on events like our Stitch Gathering retreat (where myBearpaw always brings a pop-up shop).

So if you think this may be of serious interest to you then please email me at [email protected] for more info.

The Stitch Gathering website, until now kept solely for that one event, will be getting a bit of a make over and I’ll be using this as my main business website when I launch the new SchoolHouse classes. Hence we are calling it the Stitch Gathering SchoolHouse! We did toy with calling it the ‘Church of Jo’ but thought better of it 😉

This will be the place to book not only the annual Stitch Gathering retreat (which will be unaffected by these changes) but the new SchoolHouse workshop days.

I am hoping to have a soft start with classes in late Spring and will be keeping you up to date with progress here and also in a new newsletter I’m about to start. I have never written one for this blog, instead I have been very busy writing them for the myBearpaw store/studio, the Stitch Gathering and the Thread House.  Now I think it’s time to put all my business interests together under the Jo Avery brand.  Jonathan and I designed this logo so that I could update by business cards before Quilt Market last year, and also for use on the (still fictitious, but coming soon!) patterns I hope to publish. But now I realise it was also in readiness for this next stage in my evolution.

There is a sign-up button at the top of the sidebar, so if you would like to hear all about the new SchoolHouse, my new book, patterns when they do eventually arrive, and even new exciting plans for the Thread House then please leave your email address and click the button.

And stay tuned for what promises to be a very exciting year!