Jo Avery – the Blog

Mini Chicken Pouch

It’s time to launch our Free Taster Weekend for The Thread House Academy and this year my tutorial will be this mini chicken pouch! Read on to find out why I will NOT be writing a pattern for it. I first made one of these little triangle pouches during a Golden Bobbins (my local sewing

A Forest of Poplars!

I’ve spent the last few weeks getting ready for my next online class for The Thread House Academy.  It’s my first of this academic year and it’s Poplars! You can read all about the original Poplars Quilt, and it’s genesis, in this post here, and also the first batch of Poplar class samples I made

A year of Fabric Books

Sometime between Christmas and New Year 2022 I was trying to think of an idea for us to teach at our Thread House Retreats. We were focusing on hand sewing and slow stitching with a number of different techniques and I came up with the solution of making a fabric book with all our sample

Poplars Quilt

It’s been quite a while since I shared a finished quilt here! This Poplars Quilt is a bit special as not only is it my biggest quilt ever it’s also been many years in the making. And its the first quilt to have it’s photo shoot enabled by a telehandler! Let’s go back to the

The Thread House Academy – my turn to shine!

At the beginning of the year I told you all about my new online teaching academy which I am hosting along with my two pals Karen and Lynne, better known collectively as The Thread House. You can read the post here. After a very successful launch with a free taster weekend the academy is now

Spring Embroidery News

I’ve been spending so much of my time on hand sewing recently including some new embroidery projects so I thought we could catch up here with an embroidery post. I even have a new pattern in a magazine, something I don’t do so much these days. But I really like the embroidery magazine Stitch and

Our New Online Academy!

After a huge amount of work over the last few weeks I am delighted to announce the opening of The Thread House Academy, our new online teaching platform! Karen, Lynne and I have knocked our (hand knitted) socks off getting this ready. There were times when we thought it was beyond us but we pushed

Intertwined Quilt

Today I’m delighted to share a new finished quilt! This is Intertwined and it’s made from all my Improv Flowers Workshop class samples, plus some extra details. I’ve been teaching this class since 2017 when it was a workshop choice at that year’s Stitch Gathering retreat. The initial spark was a class I took with

Freehand Rainbows and other Zen Stitching

It’s been quite a while since I last posted, I hope you’ve not been missing me too much! I have been fulfilling a lot of teaching obligations which date back two years and were all cancelled due to covid. This has kept me very busy, and though I have been making progress on various ‘class

Watermelon Eyelashes Quilt and a Moxie Update

My first quilt finish of 2022 is called Watermelon Eyelashes. This is quite a long post as I’ll be discussing how you can put too much pressure on yourself and become paralysed by it. So buckle up! This quilt begun almost a year ago after I taught my Journey to the Centre of the Earth