Social Bite Village Quilt Drive Report 2022 Part 2

I have another bumper stack of gorgeous charity quilts to share with you today, 16 in total! This is the second batch going to the Social Bite Village this year.  A huge thanks to all the wonderful quilters who have donated their quilts!

I just did a tally of all the quilts donated since I started this quilt drive back in early 2018 and it is a staggering 104!! I’m so proud of our amazing quilting community for being so generous!

For those of you who don’t know anything about this quilt drive you can read the original post here and also just put Social Bite in to the search bar top right for more posts.

But basically this is a village of Tiny Houses (designed by my husband Jonathan Avery) in the north of Edinburgh conceived and run by the incredible Social Bite charity. It gives homeless people (20 at a time) safe and comfortable accommodation (and importantly an address) along with mentoring and support to help them get back on their feet and ready for a new life in permanent housing. The results of this experimental approach have so far been very encouraging. Read more about this here.

Due to my husband’s early involvement in the project I decided (after an initial idea from Sarah Ashford) to provide quilts for every resident. Quilts that they could use in the village and take with them to their new permanent homes. Therefore I aim to provide 20-25 a year. The plan is for more villages in Dundee and Glasgow too and when these come to fruition I will work with local quilters to provide quilts for these too. I’ll let you know here when this becomes a reality.

Okay let’s look at some quilts! We’ll start with two quilts from Mary Donaldson. These are both beautiful but I am particularly drawn to the striking design above with those dark on-point squares floating above the coloured stripes.

Lovely Mary has donated around 10 quilts so far and is one of my most consistent supporters. She has a Handi Quilter long arm machine and so receives visits from my friends Liz and Pete at Pinhole Quilting. Sometimes the quilts find their way to me via a combined visit.

Another very supportive and generous quilter is Margaret McDonald.

One of the East Kilbride Quirky Quilters and a regular student from myBearpaw days Margaret has come up trumps with 3 quilts! And of course I do love the quilt above the best as it is Zen Garden a pattern from my New Patchwork and Quilting Basics book. Love it in this restrained colour palette Margaret!

Talking of the Quirky Quilters here is a gorgeous group quilt made by them. All those bright and cheery houses and trees!

‘The Quirky’s’ have been my most constantly supportive quilting group, both through group efforts and from quilts donated by their members, like Muriel Campbell who made this quilt. A simple design made so fresh and modern looking. Gorgeous Muriel!

Another very generous quilter who supports a range of charity Quilt Drives is retired librarian and prolific quilter Sheila Williams, better known as Budsmam online.  Shelia made both of these after attending curve piecing workshops with Jenny Haynes. The use of African wax fabrics has produced two incredibly striking quilts and I really don’t know how she could part with that stunner below.

My own quilt group, Edinburgh Modern Quilt Guild, has donated two quilts made during group sewing days.

I loved the crazy randomness of this orphan block quilt top so much I volunteered to quilt it on my Moxie!

I chose one of my favourite designs, square interlocking rainbows. What a fun quilt!

Their other donation was another orphan block affair with plenty of scrappy crumb blocks all with the same colour palette and set within that wide charcoal sashing.

It was lovely to hear from old quilting pal Sheila Donnachie earlier in the year when she donated with fabulous nine patch in such a calm serene palette.

Another old myBearpaw student Angela Millar made this scrappy quilt full of beautiful Tilda fabrics and passed it on to me via Jane, my occasional Girl Friday. It’s lovely to feel I’m still connected to so many quilters through this drive!

My sister Jane is another great supporter, not only does she make a couple of quilts a year for the drive but she also sews ALL the social bite village quilt drive labels to the back of the quilts when she comes up for a visit! Huge thanks Jane, that’s such a valuable job!

Jane’s quilt for this batch is this bright scrappy QAYG quilt!

A last minute addition to the batch came via Heather Wood with a really gorgeous modern quilt.

This started off as a group bee quilt with other contributors but things got disturbed by the pandemic so Heather has just finished it herself and decided it should go to Social Bite Village. It’s a really beauty Heather so thank you!

And finally a quilt by me! This is my second version of the Free Bird BOM which I made along with our Thread House Club members this year.

You can read more about this quilt in a post from the summer here.

Phew! That’s a lot of quilts to document!  Now they are all labelled, washed and dried they will be heading to the village on Tuesday.

Another huge THANK YOU to all the quilters!! And if you would like to get involved and make a quilt for the next batch then please read the info in the origin post here and send me an email! I’m always needing more quilts 🙂