Week 4 already! Wow that was quick. Judging by the amount of you who are telling me how addictive those little houses are, most of you are flying along with your Tiny and Spooky Towns! I’ve loved seeing them on social media - if you are making one and haven’t posted about it please show it off, or if you’re not on social media feel free to email me a pic and I will show it off for you. You can post it in my Facebook group Sarah Fielke Quilts, or to Instagram with the hashtag #tinytownquilt, #tinytownpattern or #tinytownsewalong, of #spookytownquilt if thats what you’re making! Loads of you have also asked if there will be a CHRISTMAS Town coming as well, and the answer to that is YES. The Christmas Town add on pattern is underway, it will be available in mid November. It’s an entirely different size AND shape, and comes with Christmas appliqués and another Spoonflower fabric panel option - and a Tiny Town CHRISTMAS STOCKING pattern!! Somebody stop me. Unbeknownst to those of you who are not members of my StitchyMites subscription club, I did some packs of 3 1/2” squares for the Spooky Town quilt, with 30 different Halloween themed and spooky fabrics from my stash in them. Its not enough to make the whole quilt but it certainly gives you some extra options. I had some spare, so I’ve opened them up for anyone who would like to buy one (until they’re gone). You can find them at my website here This week we are talking about your borders, and finishing the quilt off. The thing to remember about both Tiny Town and Spooky Town is that the borders are completely customisable. You can put extra houses, less houses, more trees, less, trees, extra ghosts… the borders are really about how much more work you want to put into your quilt, rather than them being a perfectly laid out exercise. My borders I would say are a minimum of applique unless you want your quilt to look a bit bare. I’ve thought since I first made the quilt that it would look very sweet with the houses all around the border instead of trees, so if you like that idea it works beautifully too! You would of course have a space at the corners but I think thats good actually, as it allows for the rounding and will look natural. I hand quilted Tiny Town and I’m also hand quilting Spooky Town. With all the things I have going on at present its running a little behind, but I promise to post a picture here when it’s done and bound. For Tiny Town I used masking tape to make straight lines behind the houses, and I outline quilted just outside of the roofs. I outlined all the applique too, and I rounded the corners of the quilting to echo the rounded corners of the quilt. I used white thread for the straight lines, green around the trees and hot pink around the houses and the other applique. For Spooky Town, I originally started quilting the white backgrounds in black and the black backgrounds in white, but it was too stark and I wasn’t at all happy with it. I pulled it out and started again (no wonder I’m running behind….) and I used a silvery grey thread instead. I’m really happy with it - its an Aurifil 12 weight (my preferred hand quilting thread) in colour 5007. Its silvery enough to look soft and grey on the black and still stand out on the white background. Perfection. I am quilting along just inside the seams of the strips on the white side of the fabric, rather than on the black, as that’s the down side of my seams. I have outline quilted the houses, but as the strips are thinner than the Tiny Town strips and the quilt is so much smaller, I haven’t bothered quilting the straight lines behind the houses. All the tombstones are quilted a little inside them for decoration, as well as around them, and I double quilted the ghosts to make them look spookier :) The blue threads you can see there are just my basting stitches, they will come out after. For those wondering, I use 100% cotton batting with scrim when I hand quilt - it’s Matilda’s Own brand. It’s easy to needle, keeps its shape and drapes beautifully. I always use a hoop - you can find the brand I like here - and I always use a thimble. I like Clover Open Sided thimbles, which you can find here. I also have my own brand of hand quilting needles. I use Aurifil 12 weight for all my hand quilting. Its finer and easier to work with than Perle 8, but still gives your stitches beautiful definition. It also doesn’t pill as easily as Perle 8, which can look very ratty if you cut it too long. I don’t sell single spools but I do sell my own Aurifil collection here Because I like to do big stitch quilting, these aren’t the same as ordinary hand quilting needles. It has taken me quite some years of research to find ones I like and that are the perfect thickness and strength, while having an eye thats threadable but not so big it won’t pull through the fabric. Not an easy task but I’ve got them in my hands finally! You can get them here. As a thank you for playing in my sew along, if you want to try hand quilting your town you can learn how in my on demand hand quilting class - theres a discount code just for you thats valid until October 31. Simply purchase the class (which you can watch any time, it doesn’t expire) and put in the code TINYTOWN at check out for 20% off. I hope you’ve enjoyed making your little town!! Please let me know in the comments below how your town is growing. I hope you decide to come and play again at Christmas! Happy stitching Sarah

Welcome to Wednesday! I hope all you StitchyMites out there are as well and happy as you can be. Today the final instalment of Spooky Town is mixed in with the Tiny Town Sew Along on the free blog. We’re talking about quilting and borders, and as both posts were going to be fairly similar, I thought I’d mix up a Quilt Town Soup and leave the space here for some StitchyMites treats. It’s very early morning here in Sydney as I write this, and I’ve been awake and at my computer since the sun came up. I’ll be here all day, and again tomorrow. If I’m not here I’ll be sewing and sewing and sewing and sewing. Damian is in his office, and he’s been there since dawn. He’s building me a new website, that will incorporate the shop, BOM subscriptions, StitchyMites and a wholesale portal, all in one place. It’s a putting a BIG job that we have been planning on for a few years into motion. There are a lot of moving parts. He also has a massive and very important new business presentation this week for his “real” job, so he’s up before me and falling into bed hours after me. These few weeks in September/October are always nothing short of crazy for us. Yes, I could plan better and get myself organised over six months and not have to flap, but I simply am not that person and I work better under pressure. And so. New programs starting, old programs finishing. Books being edited and material requirements being written, new quilts being designed. A whole new line of hard copy patterns being released, new products being developed. A teaching trip to Europe to be planned (we’re getting there on this I promise!!). Plus this year I’m going to Houston for Quilt Market for the first time in years, so there’s Schoolhouse presentations being organised and sales materials being written, and early morning Zooms being had with overseas companies. Plus I always seem to have an extra bright idea this time of year, and throw in things like Sew Alongs and new subscription programs just to help myself out! LOL. It’s the good kind of crazy though, where all the things you’re working towards are good things and there just aren’t enough hours in the day to cram all the ideas you have into the amount of energy you need to make them all happen. October is always the month when my Block of the Month subscriptions open for the following year. It’s a scary moment for me every time. The problem with what I do is that it isn’t quantifiable - there's no formula for it, book about it or way for me to farm it out to someone else. What makes my business a success isn’t the customer service, or the website, or the time it takes for a package to arrive or the way things are photographed - although those things are obviously also important after the fact. But none of those things are needed without The Thing that starts it all off. The Thing that makes my business bubble begins in my brain, and there’s nowhere else it can come from. So, if I scribble and play and sketch, and sketch again, and come up with a drawing for the BOM and I love it, but no one else does? Then that’s my year of work blown. It’s daunting StitchyMites, let me tell you, and I tremble every time I push a brand new baby BOM out into the world. This year I haven’t worked in quite as small a bubble as I usually do, and that has been lovely! My wonderful friend Robyn is the Liberty Fabric distributor for Australia, and she approached me mid last year asking if we could do something together. Well I love Liberty, and I love Robyn, so that seemed like a no brainer. Plus I already had another project (the one that’s taking me to Quilt Market) that wasn’t due to start until August 2024, which had kind of thrown my usual BOM schedule of January - December out, and I’d been wondering what I was going to do to fill the seven month hole in all of your stitching schedules! I couldn’t do NOTHING, I’ve never done nothing in my life! I like to keep you all on your toes :) If you’re a quilter and you live in Australia, and even if you don’t, you will have heard of The Strawberry Thief. A beautiful shop and webshop located in Perth, which is all the way over the other side of Aus from me - pretty much the distance difference between New York and LA. The Strawberry Thief is Robyn’s retail business, and it’s attached to her warehouse for the Liberty distribution, which as you can imagine is a wonderful and amazing place to go and rummage. When Robyn asked me to play BOMs with her, I put my thinking cap on and decided I wanted the quilt to have a flavour of Art Nouveau about it, to bring in William Morris and his famous Liberty design The Strawberry Thief and have a nod to Robbie’s business. I also pulled out one of my favourite books, The Grammar of Ornament, which is about the designs of Owen Jones, an architect who was a huge influence on Morris and many other designers of the times. His book has been called the Bible of Design. Theres a fab little video about him here. All that set me to thinking about tiles and stained glass and windows and classic Nouveau shapes like lozenges and circles and twisty vines, and it also set me to thinking about The Strawberry Thief itself and about Robyn’s logo…. And this is where I’ve ended up! The quilt is called Stop, Thief! It’s a lovely little mix of applique and machine piecing, and a tiny little bit of English Paper piecing too in those corner star blocks. The centre of the quilt is BIG - the square is around 40”, so that birdie stealing your needle is large and beautiful and pretty easy to applique. The lozenge windows have a curly pot plant growing on the windowsill below the stained glass radiants, and the starry glass corners are anchors for strawberry plants, with flowers and little tiny strawberry buds coming along. The exciting news is that Robyn will be selling kits for the quilt, which contains all your Liberty faves like Capel in every colour of the rainbow, Betsy and Wiltshire. The background is a very pale pink Liberty solid, and the gingham (the design below shows the sections the gingham is used in) is one of Robyn’s own pure linen fabrics. The checks are a large 1”, so although that centre might look like it needs something in the corners, the “something” is the checked fabric that will frame the birdie in the centre and provide texture and movement. You can read all about William Morris here https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/introducing-william-morris and the original Strawberry Thief design here https://thestrawberrythief.com.au/the-story-of-the-strawberry-thief/ I hope that you love my thieving birdie in the window as much as I do and that you’ll join me for 6 months of stitching him! Let me know what you think in the comments. Subscriptions, template sales and fabric kit sales open on October 15 (that's this Sunday! Sydney time don’t forget), and the first pattern will drop January 15. Because we start a little earlier than usual, we’re aiming to have everyone’s kits and templates sent out in early December, so make sure and get your orders in early. Happy stitching peeps, and I’ll see you next Wednesday for StitchyMites if I’m still awake. Don’t forget, this post is between us until Sunday…. Shhhhhhh Sarah

Hi everyone and welcome to Week 3! Have you all been sewing those houses down? I hope so, because it’s time to start making some trees. All you need for this week is one row of houses that are stitched to the background. We’re going to talk a bit about an easy way of making the trunks nice and straight and even, and how to make the circles and triangle trees. To make my trunks I used a Hera Marker (https://www.sarahfielke.com/products/hera-marker). These are such a handy little tool, you can use them for a million things. I particularly like them for making bias tape, but they’re excellent for “tape” that isn’t bias too, and thats basically what the trunks of these trees are. To make your trunks, cut your fabric to the size listed in the pattern, and then turn the piece over to the back. Rule up each side of the trunk, 1/4” in from the edge, using the Hera Marker. As you can see from the video, you need to give it a good hard go. Take the trunk to the ironing board and press along the crease on one side with the tip of the iron, and then the other. Turn the trunk over and press from the front to set the creases, and its ready to stitch, with lovely straight crisp edges! I have a handy little trick for making those circles too…. it’s one of my favourites. Making perfect circles is a difficult thing to do when sewing, and this takes all the hard work out. The trees are centred in the gaps between the houses. Make a crease to find the centre, then centre the trunk over the crease, and then add the “leaves”. Once you have everything in place and glued down (https://www.sarahfielke.com/products/liquid-applique-glue) you can just stitch them in place with their beautifully turned edges, just like we have done for the houses. The triangle trees are a little different - they are needleturn appliquéd. I use the silver gel pen (https://www.sarahfielke.com/products/silver-gel-pen) listed in the material requirements to draw the line onto the FRONT of the fabric, then glue the piece down and finger press along the line. Then use your needle to turn the piece under as you stitch. If you would like to learn more about my method of needleturn appliqué, I have an on demand, online class available at my website (https://www.sarahfielke.com/products/online-class-learn-to-needleturn-applique-sept-5-11) A reminder for those just joining us that the pattern and the set with peeper templates and papers are available for purchase, at www.sarahfielke.com There is also a smaller Halloween version of the pattern, that has some very cute little ghosts and tombstones to applique. That is available for purchase as a PDF download HERE, or you can join my StitchyMites subscription club and receive it free as part of your membership. StitchyMites will also be receiving some extra Spooky Town tips and tricks. Have fun with making your little trees peeps! And keep stitching those little EPPs together, its one row at a time :) For our last week next week, we're going to talk about those teeny little dogs, the trees in the border and rounding the corners when you bind your finished quilt. Please use the hashtag #tinytownquilt on Instagram or join my Sarah Fielke Quilts Facebook group to share your progress and see other people’s work. See you on Wednesday, October 11 for Part 4.

Welcome to Week 2! I hope you’ve all had fun cutting houses and sewing them into rows! If you have some rows ready to go then this week its time to start stitching them to the background strips. You will find all the measurements for the strip cutting in your pattern, but most importantly you’ll find the numbers of houses that are in each row, and the order that they are sewn in. At the back of the pattern are some little row markers - if you haven’t already, cut them out and use them to clip to your bundles of rows as you sew them together. It makes it so much easier when it comes to stitching the backgrounds - you will know straight away which end of the row each bundle is being glued and stitched to. Take the row of houses you’ve stitched together for the left hand side of Row 1, and open out the seam allowance away from the paper on the house that will be against the end of the strip. Press this flat, then take all the papers out from behind the houses and press again. Measure 1/4” from the end of the strip, and put the crease that was at the side of the house at the 1/4” mark, so that the side of the house is sewn into the seam allowance when the quilt is assembled. The best thing about the way the rows are organised (in my humble opinion!) is that you don’t need to measure anything. So long as you lay out your houses for the left hand side of the strip, and the right hand side of the strip, with the seam allowances opened out, then the gap in between them is the correct size to insert your tree or dog (or ghost or tombstone if you’re making Spooky Town!) And you don’t need to measure anything. Once you have everything in place and glued down (I use liquid applique glue, which is available at my website https://www.sarahfielke.com/products/liquid-applique-glue) Slip stitch the houses to the backgrounds - a nice easy task because the edges are already turned for you! A reminder for those just joining us that the pattern and the set with peeper templates and papers are available for purchase, at www.sarahfielke.com There is also a smaller Halloween version of the pattern, that has some very cute little ghosts and tombstones to applique. That is available for purchase as a PDF download HERE, or you can join my StitchyMites subscription club and receive it free as part of your membership. StitchyMites will also be receiving some extra Spooky Town tips and tricks. Have fun with making your house rows peeps! And keep stitching those little EPPs together, its one row at a time :) Please use the hashtag #tinytownquilt on Instagram or join my Sarah Fielke Quilts Facebook group to share your progress and see other people’s work. See you on Wednesday, October 4 for Part 3, where we will make some trees and learn my special trick for making perfect circles!

Hey hey StitchyMites! I hope you all enjoyed your first week as a member :) Tell your friends! The more SMites the merrier. We had a few little hiccups to start, there are a lot of moving parts to this subscription and Damo is just getting a handle on how it all works. We’ve managed to add the comment section though, so I’m looking forward to hearing from you all! Very soon you will be able to just go to www.sarahfielke.com, and you’ll find StitchyMites, your BOM subscriptions, the shop - absolutely everything in the one place, instead of having to go to different places for different things. We are even finally building a wholesale and class information section, which won’t mean much to most of you but is a HUGE step forward for me. Hooray! Well it’s been a week and a half around here that’s for sure. There’s so much going on in my world at the moment… StitchyMites, the Tiny Town Sew Along, finishing up The Secret Garden program for 2023. I’m also getting ready to launch both of my Block of the Month programs for 2023, so I thought I would give you a tiny scoop into what that might be - you have to promise me that you put it in the StitchyMites vault! Shhhh its a secret :) ​While I can’t show you the quilt designs quite yet (soon!!), I can tell you that opening for subscription on October 15 will be the FIRST of the BOMs. I’m working with a great friend of mine, Robyn from The Strawberry Thief! Robyn is the Liberty distributor in Australia, and she is going to make KITS for the quilt I’ve designed especially for her, which is so so exciting! The pattern is inspired by a famous Liberty design and by a William Morris contemporary, Owen Jones. It features applique, EPP and some art deco design touches. As usual nothing is compulsory except for the pattern subscription though - you can make the quilt with or without the kit. I get so many queries about kits each year that it’s lovely to be able to say YES this time. This program will open with the first pattern dropping on January 15 (a little earlier than usual to accomodate what’s coming later in the year!) and it will run for six months. Owing to that, its a slightly smaller and simpler design and its just gorgeous… I am loving stitching it so much. The second program I will be able to tell you about it live from Quilt Market in Houston at the end of October! Until then I am sworn to secrecy, but I’ll let slip that one of my best friends and I have been plotting for literally YEARS about how to work together and it’s finally come to fruition. This second BOM program will open for subscriptions on April 1 and the first pattern will drop on August 1. It will run for 12 months, and will also have beautiful fabric kits, yippee! With that little bit of info leaked, this week for Spooky Town we are going to start sewing the houses onto the background rows. Make sure and take note if you are making both quilts, that the Spooky Town rows are cut at 3 1/2” wide instead of the 4 1/2” for Tiny Town, so that we end up with the smaller, wallhanging size quilt. Also I didn’t mention in the video last week that the Spooky Town houses have the 1/4” seam of fabric off the bottom of them, instead of for Tiny Town where they are cut off level with the papers. If you’ve done either of the quilts the wrong way around though don’t worry, everything will still fit perfectly, look cute and be no issue, its just a tiny tweak. The Tiny Town post on the free blog this week talks about how to lay your rows out and start stitching them - however here’s a little extra video for the StitchyMites that demos it all out for you, and talks about positioning and glueing the houses, and working and hiding the applique stitches in case you haven’t done that before. The tools I show here are what I use for my method of needleturn appliqué - I bang on about them all the time in my BOM programs, so I thought I wouldn’t do that again here, but if you’re new to the process please ask below and I’ll be happy to fill you in! Don’t forget to use your discount code to sign up for the Christmas Swap, and that the Spooky Town pattern is a free download for StitchyMites members. Happy stitching peeps, and I’ll see you next Wednesday. Sarah

Hi peeps! All the exciting things I've been planning and brewing away all year are finally ready to start releasing. There's more to come in the next few weeks, this is just the beginning! I'm so excited to start revealing all the fun stuff. Please make sure to read through this whole email before you sign up or pay for anything - because there’s options, and a new fun way to get some of the things below for free! First of all, the Tiny Town Sew Along that so many of you have asked me for since the pattern originally released, begins this Wednesday, September 20 Aussie time (thats the 19th for those of you who live in YesterdayLand!). Thank you all so much for the amazing reception this little cutie has received. The Sew Along is FREE, you don’t need to sign up or do anything at all other than join in and enjoy. The one thing that you do need is buy the Tiny Town pattern - you can do that here, in either PDF or hard copy format. The pattern contains all the templates, however if you don’t want to make 199 paper houses for the English Paper Piecing, you can also buy a pack of papers and a peeper template here. The Sew Along is for the original Tiny Town quilt layout, but there’s also an option for a small, door sized Halloween banner quilt that will be revealed on Wednesday as well. The best bit about it is that there will be little applique ghosts and tombstones - instead of the dogs and bikes - and also an option to buy specially printed fat quarters with scary Halloween words on them. These are perfectly house sized and shaped, ready for you to cut out and put your papers on!! You’ll be able to choose whether to spell Spooky Town, Halloween, Trick or Treat and BOO! The quilt will still be gorgeous without the word houses, but it sure is cute with them. If you would like the pattern for the Spooky Town add on, its an extra $10 AUD and is only available via PDF.​ It’s for sale now, but it won’t be delivered to you until Wednesday when the Sew Along opens. Don’t forget to keep reading the email though, because you can get that add on pattern for free! The second exciting thing is that the signups for my Christmas Ornament Swap are now open - yippee! The Swap will run the same way as last year. Pop over and sign up, and pay the $5 admin fee - and DON’T FORGET to put your preference details in the box at check out. If you haven’t participated in my Swap before, it truly is one of my favourite things to do all year. It’s just so lovely and its fantastic to see how happy everyone is plotting their ornaments for their partners. All the details are here so that you can find out how it works and what’s expected of you.​ Hang on though - there’s a way to get the Swap for free too! And here is the drumroll - how do you get Spooky Town and the Christmas Swap for free, as well as a bunch of other things every week? I am starting a subscription program called StitchyMites. If you’re an Aussie, you’ll already be humming the song in your head… you’ll have to click through and read all about it to see what I mean. StitchyMites is a weekly newsletter from me, at a special website that’s just for members. Each week throughout the year there will be a new post. Sometimes special access to a new pattern (like Spooky Town!), sometimes discounts on existing programs (like the Christmas Swap!), sometimes a post about new fabric I’ve seen, new quilting tools, someone I follow online who I think is amazing, a new book. I might write a story. There might be a block pattern, a tutorial video, a special sale code… and you’ll have the inside scoop on new things before I make them public. It will always be different and always be fun, and you will have it all to your own little self every week of the year for only $5 AUD a month. Yep - $5 a month, which is around $3.20 US, 3 Euro or 2.60 GBP a month (at current rates). When you sign up the subscription rolls over every month and you are automatically charged, unless you choose to opt out which you can do at any time. Sound fun? I’ve got some fun things planned for you, I do hope you’ll join me and be a happy little StitchyMite! Click here to sign up, the first post will be for Spooky Town and it will be up on Wednesday. So that’s a huge amount of information for one email, but I do need to tell you one more thing, and that’s about my 2024 Block of the Month program. Information will be coming very soon, but suffice to say its very exciting… I have two programs running in 2024, one after the other, and I have partnered with some incredibly exciting people to bring them to you. They are both very very different from each other, and both will have optional…. DRUMROLL…. FABRIC KITS!! I know that SO MANY OF YOU have asked me for kits in the past and peeps, they are COMING. Woohoo!! I’m bursting with excitement in case you can’t tell! I hope you’ll all come along for the ride. Sarah

HELLO everyone! I hope you’re all ready for a load of cute little houses and trees. The Tiny Town sew along is for anyone who would like to make the Tiny Town quilt! Over the next four Wednesdays I will be posting some tips and tricks at this same web address, for making your quilt. There is no charge or registration for the sew along, however you will need the Tiny Town pattern, which is available as a hard copy HERE, or a PDF download HERE. If you purchased the add on yesterday, it has been emailed to you today. Please note that owing to the new website delay we’ve had I didn’t quite finish my border - I’m stitching it as soon as I close my computer, and you will receive the updated pattern with the border information via email before the end of the week. The set with peeper templates and papers is also available for purchase, however it is optional - it just means you don’t have to make all the papers for the English Paper Piecing of the houses yourself. There is also a Halloween version of the pattern, that has some very cute little ghosts and tombstones to applique. That is available for purchase as a PDF download HERE, or you can join my StitchyMites subscription club and receive it free as part of your membership. StitchyMites will also be receiving some extra Spooky Town tips and tricks. The first part of the Tiny Town quilt is to make all your houses! The pattern is written in the simplest manner for making them in my opinion. The houses are English paper pieced, and then appliquéd to the background fabric. This makes it very easy, as the EPP is only one seam for each house, and the papers ensure that your houses are accurate and have neat and tidy edges. Its very quick and efficient. The best way to tackle this quilt is to cut out and baste a load of houses, and start stitching them into their groups. You can find the numbers of houses for each row and markers to keep track of your groups of houses in the Tiny Town pattern (and the different sizes and groups in the Spooky Town add on). You’ll find that these houses are really addictive, quick and easy to sew. Don’t worry about any applique this week unless you’re a really speedy prepper. In order to be ready to sew down your rows of houses next Wednesday, all you need is ONE set of houses basted and stitched together so that we can talk about The video here has some tips and tricks for English Paper Piecing in case you’re a newbie at that! I used glue for this quilt, but I show both glue and thread basting, and talk about why EPPing this little quilt is a lot easier and faster and less scary than doing a regular EPP quilt. If you are wanting to do the Spooky Town version of the quilt, the lettering that is in some of the rows is a fabric I designed myself. You absolutely do NOT need to have the fabric to make the quilt, but it sure is cute with it. The fat quarters come in three colourways, and each fat quarter has the all of the words: HALLOWEEN TRICK OR TREAT BOO SPOOKY TOWN as well as some wee ghosts to add to your quilt if you choose. I have used a black and an orange fat quarter. If you want to use it, you can buy it HERE. I chose to use the words SPOOKY TOWN but you could use as many or as few words as you like - the little Halloween quilt has been designed to take even the longest word in the row. I am using BOO in my border and some of the ghost house prints. PLEASE NOTE. There are two different kinds of panels available at my Spoonflower shop for sale. One has WHITE seam allowance showing around the houses, and the others have NO seam allowance showing. If you are English Paper Piecing the houses, please purchase the houses with NO seam allowance showing, so that you don't see a white edge when you turn the fabric over the papers. If you are hand piecing or using fusible web, please purchase the houses with the seam showing to make your stitching and cutting easier. Spoonflower fabric is fairly stiff at first, and it smells a little like the ink they use to print. I recommend prewashing before you sew. Have fun with houses peeps! Please use the hashtag #tinytownquilt on Instagram or join my Sarah Fielke Quilts Facebook group to share your progress and see other people’s work. See you on Wednesday, September 27 for Part 2.

Registration pens today for my annual Christmas Ornament swap! The first year I did this it was during the pandemic, and the Swap was only available for Aussies. However SO MANY OF YOU wanted to play from around the world, that the last two years I opened it to everyone around the world - and it was such fun and such a success that I'm doing it again. Plus we had NO FLAKERS two years in a row if you can believe that! Everyone sent their package - only one was lost in the post. Let's all be awesome and do that again this year peeps : There are some things you need to know that are VERY IMPORTANT before you sign up so please read everything before you hare off to join. The swap works like this. You register at my website, I take a few weeks to work out everyone’s partners, you are sent their name and address and preferences for a Christmas ornament. You then make or purchase an ornament, and post it to them by the deadline date, along with a little treat or a Christmas card or whatever takes your fancy to send. Details of dates, rules, signups etc are on the website. You will also receive an email after you sign up. Please DO NOT JOIN if you cannot commit to making or purchasing something for your partner by the shipping date. Also please remember that people go to a lot of trouble to make lovely things, you need to send something to your partner that you would enjoy receiving yourself. There is a $5 AUS registration fee to participate. This is basically to cover the admin, which is extensive when there are so many of you! We had several hundred last year and its a lot of organising and emailing and chasing people up. PLEASE NOTE that if you join my new StitchyMites club, the $5 fee is waived especially for members. Go to your StitchyMites account after Wednesday, September 20 for your Swap code. Your partner could be from anywhere in the world. I simply cannot manage to partner people only within their own country, especially as well had people from 15 different countries last year. Participants are mainly from Australia, New Zealand and the USA. Please don’t sign up if you are not willing to post your package internationally. Remember that a small flat Christmas ornament made of fabric or felt tucked inside a Christmas card won’t be heavy, so there are ways to send something lovely without having to pay a lot of postage. That’s it! I hope you’ll join us, it was truly lovely last year. Use the hashtag #sarahchristmasswap or #aussieornamentswap and the screenshot of my Jinglebird birdie to post on social media about your ornament or to let your stitchy friends know about the fun! CLICK HERE TO REGISTER PLEASE please remember to read everything carefully and to put your preferences in at checkout! Thank you xxxx

Hooray! The Tiny Town Sew Along that so many of you have asked me for since the pattern released begins this Wednesday, September 20 Aussie time (thats the 19th for those of you who live in YesterdayLand!). Thank so much to you all for the amazing reception this little cutie has received. The Sew Along is FREE, you don’t need to sign up or do anything at all other than join in, stitch along and enjoy. The one thing that you do need is buy the Tiny Town pattern - you can do that here, in either PDF or hard copy format. The pattern contains all the templates, however if you don’t want to make 199 paper houses for the English Paper Piecing, you can also buy a pack of papers and a peeper template here. The Sew Along is for the original Tiny Town quilt layout, but theres also an option for a small, door sized Halloween banner quilt that will be revealed on Wednesday too. The best bit about Spooky Town is that there will be little applique ghosts and tombstones, instead of the dogs and bikes - and also an option to buy specially printed fat quarters I designed, with scary Halloween words on them! They are perfectly house sized and shaped, - ready for you to cut out and put your papers on!! You’ll be able to choose wether to spell out Spooky Town, Halloween, Trick or Treat or BOO! In your house rows - or you can use them all. Each fat quarter contains all the words, and some little ghosts besides. The quilt will still be gorgeous without the word houses, but it sure is cute with them. If you would like the pattern for the Spooky Town add on, its an extra $10 AUD and is only available via PDF. It’s for sale now, but it won’t be delivered to you until Wednesday when the Sew Along opens. You must have the original Tiny Town pattern as well for the measurements and house details and instructions. HOWEVER! If you have joined my StitchyMites club, you will get the Halloween add on as part of your subscription - click here for all the details. To participate and see everyone else’s quilts, please use and follow the hashtag #tinytownquilt on Instagram, or join my Facebook group to see everyone else’s progress - /sarahfielkequilts. The first post for the Sew Along will be HERE, on Wednesday September 20, Sydney time. There will be a total of four posts, one each Wednesday for four weeks, ending October 18. I hope you’ll stitch along with me peeps! This is such a fun and addictive little quilt. Thank you xxxx