Jo Avery – the Blog

Tiny House Town

I have been busy recording the videos for my next The Thread House Academy class over the last few weeks and this has involved making some fun new items. I have been teaching this as an ‘in person’ workshop since 2018 when it was a class for that year’s Stitch Gathering (the annual one day

Twelve Green Bottles and other new Academy workshops

I have a new quilt to share with you today! This is Twelve Green Bottles and I made it for a new workshop in The Thread House Academy. We have just launched our third Academy year today with enrolment now open! Every year we plan a whole year’s worth of online workshops, one per month.

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

Temperature Quilt Fabric Book for 2024

As soon as I got up on Tuesday 31st December I stitched the last temperature block for 2024. Luckily (!) it was a very rainy day so I could decide on the weather code for the day with confidence. I’d already sewn the other 2″ blocks into the 16 block pages and had them up

Doodlebug and Quilts of 2024

Amazingly we are about to head into 2025! How can we be a quarter through this century already?! I’m so pleased I’ve continued to write this blog even though the distance between my posts stretches a little more each year, but these annual round ups of quilts are an important marker and I managed to

Pop Art Dandelion and a Quilted Jacket

I managed to (sort of) have two weeks off at the start of July.  Running your own business from home means it’s hard to take a break without physically leaving home but I live in such a beautiful place that I don’t want to go anywhere else! So instead I try to avoid emails and

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

Beech Canopy Quilt

I have a finished quilt to share today, one that I started about a year ago. This is Beech Canopy and it was inspired by looking up at the tops of my favourite beech trees from below in the spring. I love that fresh green colour and the way the sun sparkles through them. I

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