All works of art can tell a story, but only quilts don't mind if you sit on them for hours. Learn to create a forgiving craft with today's Groupon: for $20, you get $40 worth of quilting or embroidery classes at Cottage Quilting, with locations on Harvey Avenue and in Vernon.

Cottage Quilting's seasoned quilters and embroiderers coach artists of all experience levels in more than 50 two- to six-hour workshops. In Basically Quilting ($89), quilters explore the inner lives of colour, fabric, thread, construction, borders, quilting equipment, and introductory techniques. Choose from four provided designs for workshop instruction, or introduce your own course-appropriate pattern. Meanwhile, instructor Sandy leads students in crafting fat-quarter quilts from a favoured Buggy Barn or stack-and-whack pattern in Stack-and-Whack courses ($39) and explores the shaggy world of rag quilts in a Hopscotch Hearts Rag Quilt class ($39). HoopSisters Embroidered Block of the Month ($130) takes students through four monthly courses exploring innovative, professional-quality threading skills on a wooden embroidery hoop. At each session's start, instructor Gwen dispenses quilt-block embroidery files and felt-hunting dogs to guide students to project completion. Students should expect to bring their own pattern, fabric, and sewing machine to some classes.

Sewers may draw pattern inspiration and hamster-cape templates from the embroidery design studio's 44,000 designs, loading file templates onto their own USB drives. In addition to classes, Cottage Quilting outfits thread manipulators with a wide selection of fabrics, patterns, kits, accessories, and supplies. Cottage Quilting also boasts Brother and Bernina sewing and embroidery machines, enabling students to put newfound or refurbished fabric-taming skills into practice.