Treasures from another age at Coleton Fishacre

Following on from a look at the gardens in winter, today I’m sharing some of the items which caught my eye as we looked around the 1920s Arts and Crafts house, the country home of the D’Oyly Carte family and a must see for anyone interested in that era, and with a love for the elegance of Art Deco.

What I like about the house is that there’s always something new to see, our visit this time was before Christmas and the house was dressed for hosting a lavish party, with plenty of feathers used on the dining table and in between the branches of the Christmas trees.

At first it was the shape of this side table which caught my eye, and then I noticed the well-read books…

And my eye kept being caught as we moved through the house, what with the vanity sets, the tiles in the bathroom and the concoctions on the shelf below the mirror!

I even found a sewing kit, and a grand looking one at that. I couldn’t see what was in the containers, but I did approve of the glass alongside the gorgeous wooden box!

They really do evoke opulence and belong to a different age don’t they?

Then we headed downstairs to the ‘downstairs’ part of the house, which in this case is actually on the ground floor, but there were plenty of ‘downstairs’ items on display - note the blanc-mange recipe on the pudding basin, which of course would be upside down if you were actually using it as a bowl.

In the dining room I was met with the opulence of feathers and crystal - it looks like it was going to be a good party!

Moving into the library a couple more things caught my eye, including somewhere well used for all those telegrams and a nifty looking decoration on the tree made from a playing card - now that’s some inspiration isn’t it?

It’s often the little things you notice that makes these properties come to life, and it’s no different with the treasures on display during this visit to Coleton Fishacre.

And I really do need to work out how that tree decoration goes together….

Making my Mystery Block of the Month: December 2025

You’ll have seen that I plan to complete Sherri’s mystery block a month quilt and in my last post I shared the test blocks which I made into my fourteenth charity quilt, today I’m sharing the centre block I made for my own quilt.

It’s the final block of the month, and it’s a star as I was expecting - and another scrappy star at that. It’s similar in shape to the April and August blocks, but this time there’s triangles cutting across the edges of the centre square, which gives the effect of having the remaining central square set diagonally.

It’ll make more sense when you see it, but first I had to choose which blues to use for this month’s block. I have three navy fabrics which I’ve been using, but now the quilt assembly is within touching distance I have my eye on having enough of one of those navy fabrics for a border.

So I used the blue fabric in the centre which reminds me of Portuguese tiles. I know it’s not much and it may not save me anything at all, but my mind is in conservation of fabric mode, so the combination above is the one I was the happiest with.

And it’s a great block to sew, in fact I forgot to take any pictures until this point. Oops.

And of course having paused for a photo, when I restarted sewing and added that final row I was a little more off with my seams than I was happy with, so out came the unpicker…

Thankfully I was much happier with my second attempt and so next came the borders, and I’m back on the original greens for this block.

SEE WHAT I MEAN ABOUT THE CENTRAL SQUARE SET ON THE DIAGONAL?

I know now that switching greens when I did, back March, was the right call as I have very little left of the outer green with white circle fabric left. Phew - but I did ponder on that a fair bit at the time!

So now I have twelve completed blocks, but not yet a quilt.

Next up is finalising my plan for adding the borders and sashing between each of the blocks. I know that I want to use the borders to give the quilt as much width as I can without it looking daft, and I think that I’ve got a plan - I just need to check that I have enough fabric to do it.

As I’m a spatial learner, and like to see how things will work out, that’s likely to mean laying all the blocks and rough measuring the fabric alongside them. I’ll be using the kitchen floor for that!

Look out for a post soon sharing all the blocks together - I haven’t laid them out yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be good!

This is the last mystery block now the work starts to assemble the quilt top, you can also check out my previous posts for my mystery block quilt or the charity quilts made from the test blocks.

Stars and spots

I’ve made another quilt as part of my quilting ‘stretch’ project using the block from Sherri at A Quilting Life’s mystery block a month. As I said then I don’t know if I’ll manage to make a quilt a month, but I won’t really know unless I try…

This is my fourteenth charity quilt and the pile continues to grow, since the first nine have were donated to the Mansfield Coordinator of Project Linus UK in September 2025.

Number fourteen

This charity quilt also marks the end of my ‘stretch’ project where I set out to make a quilt for charity a month, so it is a huge milestone and a very big phew from me! I’ll be celebrating that in a separate post soon, and I already know I won’t be quite so rash when setting myself a challenge for the remaining of this year!

But anyway, on to the block which is another scrappy star. I had some fabrics in my ‘already used’ basket that I was keen to use as much of as I could, so that’s where I started. I cut all the central blocks using the same fabrics, and ended up with four very similar piles.

The sewing on this block was relatively easy, and used the stitch and flip method to create the triangle sections of the blocks. The challenge there is to make sure you cut off the correct corner, otherwise it means starting again. It’s definitely worth a check and double check before snipping the corner, and that method has served me well.

With the four central blocks made I wanted to check my fabric choices for the borders. Here I discovered that the dark blue fabric (on the far right below) had a much richer blue on the ‘wrong’ side, so the wrong side became my right side. Many of these fabrics have already appeared in previous quilts; the two blues were previously a sun dress (the lighter blue) of mine and a work shirt of MOH’s (the darker blue). The spotty fabric is the offcuts from the baby quilt I made on the Project Linus sewing day in September 2025, and the teal, grey and yellow spotted design is the only ‘new’ fabric to be used, and that came from a charity destash sale.

Happy with my fabric choices I started to add my borders, liking the dark blue on opposite sides as in the image below.

I thought it needed another border, and the grey zig zag material was the only one that had enough length - just as well it worked well.

In fact I had enough of the grey zig zag fabric (the backing of a former king size duvet cover) that I was able to include some on the back too. I also played with how I quilted this one, as you can see in the photo above I quilted the left hand section horizontally, and at right angles to the quilting across the rest of the quilt.

I like the finish this gave, and it also made it much easier to quilt, so that’s something I should bear in mind going forwards.

And so, just like that, it was finished - well after I’d added the scrappy binding, which also gave me a bit of a headache. I don’t usually use the final border fabric in the binding, but I’d already sewn my scraps for the binding before I added the final border this time round.

I started pinning the binding on and quickly arrived at my first zig zag clash - and it clashed so much, I know my eyes would not have been happy with it, so I pinned that in a way that my eyes could cope with - and I’m quite pleased with how the bottom left corner turned out. I was also lucky that the other zig zag instances also lined up pleasingly - phew!

I hadn’t set out to use three different varieties of spots, and zig zags too - but that’s what I ended up with and it’s worked out just fine, and also provided the inspiration for this quilt’s name.

And what a one to end my ‘stretch’ project with!

You can see my other quilts I’ve made to donate to Project Linus - a charity whose mission is to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children, who are sick, disabled, disadvantaged or distressed through the donation of new, homemade, washable quilts and blankets, including those that are part of this ‘stretch’ project in earlier posts.