Summer 2025

The Friendship Quilt Update

A friendship quilt is a type of patchwork, typically made as a gift, to celebrate a special occasion. Our quilt is to celebrate the twinning of The Oasis Academy, Putney with School 73 in Lviv. Many individuals are collaborating to create the quilt.

Each person who has made a block or square, has embroidered their name on it. It represents a collective effort and an enduring friendship amongst the participants and recipients. The 100 embroidered squares form the centre of the quilt but that is only one part of the design. These are then surrounded by strips of patterned fabric squares sewn together.  This is called sashing.

The friendship pinwheel design forms the outer border of the quilt.

Rendering the design ( i.e. generating it on the computer) was extremely complicated. As this is a group project, this design was required to ascertain how many squares and triangles needed to be cut. In the image above, the white squares are where the embroidered names are placed and the blue or green squares are for the patterned fabric squares. Finally the red pinwheels show where the friendship design is placed. Each section is then delegated to specific volunteers to complete.

Well-being bags

King’s College London are hosting an induction day for Junior Paediatric Doctors at their Denmark Hill site. They have requested 61 well-being bags. In their words, “They went down so well last time and all the new doctors were super grateful”.

Rosie has developed a pattern for a fabric desk caddy to be included in the bags. These are made of donated upholstery cloth, unsuitable for scrubs.

Each wellbeing bag contains a hand made card with an individual message written by the volunteers. The front of the card is hand painted by one of our regular volunteers, Lesley Hazel. In April her painting of the Cornish Gillyflower Apple was selected by the judges to be part of the United Kingdom exhibition in the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists Gallery, Birmingham. In addition, her work will form part of the international slideshow that will be viewed at the various events associated with the 32 countries participating in Botanical Art Worldwide - 2025.

But wait! There’s more.

Lesley also received a message to say that her acanthus had been selected for the 40th Exhibition of the Society of Botanical Artists at the Mall Galleries in May. Many congratulations to Lesley and we very grateful for her ongoing wellbeing efforts.

Thank You

Special Thanks to the Townswomen’s Guild in Ickenham for their incredibly generous support with knitted items, The Dress A Girl Around the World for their sewn and knitted garments and blankets.

Thanks also to the Women in Fellowship Wimbledon group who donated a large stash of candle wax.

Sewing Club

Over the last two terms the children, aged 6-10, in the sewing club have been working away on their embroidered cushions which were completed just before the end of the term. To say that the children were delighted with their achievements would be an understatement, they were over the moon.

They learned how to use a seat embroidery frame to build on the techniques learned over previous projects. The sewing club has been very successful, the children love their time with us. Many thanks to the volunteers who help to make this such a success.