My Longarm Learning

One of the many highlights of doing what we do is meeting creative people who enhance our life experience.  Handi Quilter Ambassador Pauline Burbidge and her husband Charlie Poulsen have spent a lifetime living their creative pursuits. In theory and practice their lives are artistic ones, whether it's Pauline's quilts, paintings and drawings or Charlie's sculptures, living sculptures or drawings.  When Pete and I have been lucky enough to visit them in their Scottish Borders home we have left feeling as though we've been immersed in a pool, emerging back into a world that needs more of what we just experienced.  Visit our Blog Post to see photos from our trip a few years ago. BLOG POST - Coffee with Pauline and Charlie Pauline wrote to us after one of our Facebook Live sessions earlier this year and sent details of one of her recent projects at the Pitt Rivers Museum. One of Pauline's recent landscape quilts being stitched on her Handi Quilter Avante. Photo Credit P

Despite the global pandemic the past year has been a busy one for crafters everywhere.  Lockdown has led to many looking at projects bought in an inspiring retail shop or at a show pre Covid which had been consigned to the "to do" project box. Our stashes grew ever larger but maybe in 2020/2021 some of those projects were cut and sewed. Hooray!  But... It 's not a quilt until it's quilted! If you're one of the many piecers who find the quilting difficult because you have a domestic machine that just can't take the bulk of the quilt then a longarm may be the answer.  Our Facebook Live on 17th April 2021  we did a LIVE walkaround of our Pinhole Quilting showroom.  You can view it in the You Tube video below or on our Facebook page -  Read on for more about the Handi Quilter Longarms and a recent installation at a New Threads Quilt Shop in Hampshire. Options are increasing as to how this can be achieved. You can send your quilt away to be quilted with a longarm q

We were sad to hear of the death of the Duke of Edinburgh today. There are few other people alive who have had personal experience of the world and the people at the highest level of government as the 99 year old Prince.  However, it was his impact at grassroots level that really impressed me as a 14 year old. Like many schoolchildren in the UK I took part in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme with first of all the Bronze award at school.  My community service was to serve tea at the local hospice, an experience which was so valuable and I still remember some of the lovely people I met there. I'm not sure many people had wine-making as their hobby but I justified it on the basis of it being quite technical! I learnt how to plan a walk, hang wall-paper and play golf!  From that small seed my experience of walking and expeditions grew and at University I joined the Duke of Edinburgh Society becoming Treasurer and Expedition Leader in my last year. I'm proud that I trained f