Jo Avery – the Blog

Giveaway results and lovely gifts for me!

First of all let’s get those results out the way! The winner of the Stitch Gathering Goody Bag is number 86! Congratulations Gill!! I will email you privately to get your address 🙂 Commiserations to everyone else, but to make up for your loss let’s look at some pretty things. I wanted to highlight the

Stitch Gathering Ticket Tote Gallery!

So as you all know by now it was the Stitch Gathering Retreat week last Sunday. This year we printed our tickets onto a cotton tote bag and sent this to all our attendees along with a note telling them to embellish the bag anyway they wanted and then swap it with a secret partner

Stitch Gathering Goody bag GIVEAWAY!! And Linky!!

It’s time to give away the contents of our fabulous Stitch Gathering Retreat Goody Bag!! And look how amazing it is! We were so lucky to have such generous and supportive sponsors. Coats gave us wonderful threads and needles, Groves and Bank provided the useful embroidery scissors, DMC the lovely embroidery thread, Nairns came up

We came, we stitched and we gathered!

The second Stitch Gathering Modern Quilt Retreat took place on Sunday. I feel like I have hardly drawn breath since then as I’ve been desperately battling to finish a load of commissions in time. Plus there was this ‘thing’ going on in Scotland you might have heard about. It was very distracting! So I’m finally

Luke Haynes!

Have you heard of the amazing American quilter Luke Haynes?? Well he is coming to the UK next month!! And he is coming to Edinburgh and our Modern Quilt Guild are hosting ‘An Evening With Luke Haynes’ lecture!! The date is Friday 10th October, the place is The Eric Liddell Centre in Bruntsfield, the time

Sashiko!

About 18 months ago I bought a couple of Sashiko panels from a stand at the Scottish Quilt show at Ingliston. I started one of them straight away but didn’t get very far. After having done a fair bit of embroidery using a hoop I initially found it difficult not using one. You can’t use

Granny Squares Quilt

It always takes me a while to get round to these popular quilts that are quilt-a-longs etc.  I’ve loved the Granny Square quilts from afar for a while now (especially the one Lynz made which was part of our Scottish Modern Quilt Exhibition last year) but never got round to making a whole quilt –

Disappearing Diamonds

  I made these cushion covers for the latest issue of Love Patchwork and Quilting, which is out today… This issue is all about colour so I was playing around with a 2-tone effect. A bit out of my confort zone really (why use 2 colours when you can use 20?!) and I have to

New EPP Cushion Kits

Do you remember the Sweet Life pillow I made last year for Blend Fabric’s stand at Houston? Well I intended to make a kit of that particular cushion. However I never got my act together in time and now we have just about sold out of Cori Dantini’s The Sweet Life fabric. So I thought

Easy Tote Bag Tutorial

For a while now I’ve had this gorgeous ‘Made for Adventure’ panel of Cori Dantini’s (from her The Sweet Life collection) and have been meaning to do something with it. Recently we put our remaining stock of these panels in our summer sale and I decided it would be a good time to finally make