Social Bite Village Quilt Drive 2025

It’s time for a Social Bite Village Quilt Drive post! I’ve been collecting and distributing donation quilts to the Social Bite Village in Edinburgh since 2018 and I am about to deliver another 10 quilts! That will bring the total donations to 124!! Huge thanks to all the amazing quilters who have contributed over the last 7 years. You can read my initial post and call for quilts here and all about the Social Bite Village itself here.

Let’s take a closer look at this year’s batch and we will start with a lovely collaboration. I few years ago Karen Lewis gave me a huge sack of her orphan blocks and I have been using these to make charity quilts, a few of which are coming up in this post. But as well as the disparate blocks there were two fully completed quilt tops!!

I mean who gives away completed quilt tops?! Karen you are mad! But in a good way as both of these have been turned into Social Bite quilts with the help of Irene Comley! Irene has a relatively new Handi Quilter long arm and as such is keen to have tops to practice on. So she very kindly took the two completed tops, quilted them beautifully AND bound them by hand!!

That Lone Star at the top is one and this super scaled HST block quilt below is the other. Aren’t they absolute stunners?!! Irene brought them along to our January Thread House Retreat for Show and Tell and the images show Karen helping to hold them up – of course she would really like to have them back now!! 😉

Not only did Irene quilt both of these but she also contributed two more quilts in this latest batch including this stunning wonky crosses in blues.

And this simple strip quilt in lovely reds with one of my favourite Random Plaid grids. Huge thanks for these four incredible quilts Irene!

Another cheery strip quilt has been donated by Muriel, one of Irene’s fellow quilters from Glasgow and another serial donator to this quilt drive. Muriel hasn’t been very well recently so I’m wishing her all the best and a big thank you for providing this beautiful quilt.

The next two are from another quilter who has been unwell recently. My lovely Pal Shelia ‘Budsmam’ came to see me about a year ago to donate these two fabulous quilts.

Since then Sheila has been really struggling with her health and we have all been hoping and praying for a speedy recovery. Things are looking up a bit now I’m very pleased to say and I know all her quilting friends will extend these good wishes and love to Shelia.

I absolutely love this gorgeous sampler quilt Sheila made with that amazing text background fabric.

Finally I’m finishing off this quilt tour with 3 that I made. These two come straight out of Karen’s orphan block sack.

It’s really easy to make quilts from Karen’s discarded blocks as she tends to make a lot of stuff with her latest fabric collection so it is quite easy to just find all of those and put a quilt together from that selection.

This quilt was made with Karen’s first collection for Figo Fabric called ‘Hand Stitched’.

I love making up these orphan block quilts as all the hard boring work has been done for me (cutting accurately, making HST etc.) and all I do is some fun jigsaw puzzle work fitting it all together on the design wall and then some more fun FMQ on my Moxie long arm!

The other great thing about Karen’s work is she has quite a restricted palette of colours that she likes to use so with this next one above I was able to just pick out enough blocks with similar shades. Some of these pieces were really big panels to start with so the whole thing goes together very quickly!

And finally this last one was made with more of Karen’s blocks but was actually sewn together by Irene (yes her again!) and quilted by me. So it’s a three-way collaboration!

My sewing group The Golden Bobbins had a charity sewing day last September and I brought in the big sack and we set about making a number of quilt tops. I think we got 5 finished on the day with at least one more afterwards!

I quilted this one which used all of Karens black and white samples with some pops of turquoise and gold. These quilts are a great way to practice FMQ and try out some new ideas with less at stake.

After I had finished this quilt I really had to start concentrating on the forthcoming exhibition at FOQ and had to put all else aside. The other 5 are patiently waiting until the Autumn to be finished on the Moxie and then will go into the charity quilt pile. The Social Bite Village is moving very soon and expanding their housing so more quilts will be needed.

If you would like to donate a quilt do please read the original post here and then send me an email or just comment below and we can discuss further when I reply to that (in an email). Originally we tried to provide quilts suitable for single beds but as the inhabitants take their quilts with them to their new homes once they leave I think any size is fine up to 70″.