Festival of Quilts 2018 Report

Yes… that IS me and Kaffe Fassett!

This year my Festival of Quilts adventure began (at 8am!) with an appearance on the Sewing Quarter.  And if you read my last post you will already know that the other guest that day was none other than the legendary Kaffe Fassett – one of my biggest design heroes.

He was lovely and chatty, and very obliging when I asked him for a selfie while he was signing books before broadcasting began. This is one for the scrapbook for sure 🙂

I had such a blast on my second Sewing Quarter appearance, I really just love doing it! I especially liked being on with Natasha again, she is wonderfully calm and relaxed and we had quite a laugh together (especially over the ironing!).  If I lived closer to the studios I would do it more often but at least I can pop in every year when I am down for FOQ (both SQ and FOQ are in/around Birmingham).

You can watch both my shows, plus two terrific shows with Kaffe, on the SQ YouTube channel here.

After all that excitement (and a 5.45pm start to the day!) it was time to hot foot it to the NEC and Festival of Quilts!!

I immediately bumped into my best buddy Karen Lewis and the lovely Sarah Thomas (Sariditty) our new glamorous teacher for Thread House Retreat 2019! Sarah was visiting the UK for the first time (from the USA) to check out FOQ.  Here we are standing, appropriately, in front of the Thread House Retreat group quilt, which was hanging in a really great spot.

Much excitement followed with the launch of the Great British Quilter thread box on the Aurifil Stand! You can not imagine how noisy it was with all these quilters chatting like crazy after being either reunited or introduced for the first time. Such fun!

There is a GIVEAWAY happening on Instagram until 8pm Friday 17th August (tomorrow) so you still have time to enter. It is a Loop giveaway which means you have to visit all the designers in the collection (it doesn’t actual take that long!). You can start anywhere so click here to begin – good luck! You can also buy the collection from our website here.  We only have limited stock left at present but more will be arriving very soon!

Day two of FOQ began with a walk around as many of the competition quilts as I could manage accompanied by my lovely friend Tatyana.  Here we are standing in front of our entry to the Two Person Category ‘Modern Love’. This quilt was the MQG’s Quilt of the Month in January this year, and members can download the pattern for free. Read all about it in this post.

Here are some of my favourite quilts this year.

I absolutely loved this Modern Category entry by Tracy Pereira, that quilting is SO perfect!

 

Two more favourites from the Modern Category, on the left ‘Curled’ by Charlie Mankin (who is one half of the #GreatBritishQuilter team), such an original quilt! And on the right ‘Atomic Quilt’ by Deb McGuire, which could just be my favourite quilt ever!

Two more fabulous quilts, the left hand one below is by Louisa Goult  of Sewmotion, and is all hand sewn and quilted.

It was in the Contemporary section but I think it could just have easily been in the Modern.

The one on the right is by Nicky Eglinton and Trudy Wood and was absolutely stunning, unfortunately I didn’t get a great photo of it!

Apart from the competition quilts there were also amazing gallery spaces with even more incredible quilts.  I absolutely loved Alexandra Kingswell’s ‘More than the Sum’ exhibition and wish I could have spent longer there.

The most amazing quilts in the whole show were the ones in the Japanese gallery.  These were so breathtaking that I couldn’t handle them for more than a few minutes at a time. The work involved and the beauty was simply staggering! These are close-ups of one of my favourites by Sachiko Hattori, they can’t possibly do it justice, if you ever get a chance to see them jump at it!

As with most year’s I will probably have missed more quilts than I actually saw largely due to a full teaching schedule.  I taught two Academy workshops and gave a lecture on Colour Theory for Quilts.  All went really well and I had some excellent and lovely students (but alas no photos of their work this year!). Thanks to everyone who came along and attended!

But I did manage to squeeze in a Facebook Live demo on the Aurifil stand on Saturday afternoon. These little ‘Faberge Eggs’ were part of it as I showed some embroidery stitches involved in my Passionflower design – ‘laid work’, ‘whipped back stitch, and ‘buttonhole stitch’.  You can watch it again here.  My new Aurifil 12wt thread collection was a huge hit and had practically sold out before I got a chance to properly launch it! We had to put a few boxes aside so I had some for the video!  These were all nabbed as soon as it was over 🙂

I have more boxes on order which should be in by the end of August and we will be having a launch on the Aurifil blog (accompanied by a free embroidery pattern!) on Friday 7th September – more on this nearer the time.

Lastly I did manage a little speed shopping, mainly at the wonderful @beyond_measure_uk.  I bought those fab ‘cut out and sew’ tea towels by Sarah Young, the SEW panel, the Washi tape and straight edged tracing wheel, plus that adorable ceramic lady pincushion!
The repro vintage fabric is from @thequiltersguild shop and the blue and white florals (for a specific project) are from @cowslipworkshops.

I also collected a few new badges/buttons/pins for my show lanyard. My favourite is this year’s Quilter’s Guild badge with the lady from the 1718 Coverlet, which actually made me cry when I saw it for real at the show. I think it was the idea that 300 years ago women (I presume) were cutting fabric up and sewing it together in their own creative designs, just like we still are today – such a powerful and moving thought!

So that’s another year over and I will leave you with this fabulous photo of myself, Karen, Sarah and the wonderful Kerry – our Thread House tutor team for 2019 – beside the Aurifil stand, and looking so delighted and happy to be there and in each other’s company.  And that is what the whole thing is about. It might be intense and exhausting but it’s our incredible community that makes this such a special event.

I already have my hotel booked for next year!