The Stitch Gathering Ticket Quilt!

Today I am taking part in the Blogger’s Quilt Festival Spring 2014! I have exhibited at every festival apart from the first (didn’t get my blog started until a few weeks after it took place!).

Once you’ve read all about this quilt please head over to Amy’s blog and take a look at all the others!

Last August I hosted the first Stitch Gathering Modern Quilt Retreat in Edinburgh. It was a huge success and we are just gearing up for another great day on September 14th this year.

Last year all participants were sent a fabric ticket in the post. We had these printed in 7 different colourways by Spoonflower.

We asked everyone to embellish their tickets any way they wanted and hand them back at the event.
Well, as you can see, our Retreaters excelled themselves!

A couple of weeks ago I started piecing all 56 blocks in to this quilt which I just finished (almost) yesterday.
I’d love to show you a close up of every single ticket as they are all so imaginative and creative, but I know you have other quilts to view so we’ll just highlight a few sections.

I started to hand quilt some of the centres to add extra texture (see top left and right tickets above) but ran out of time (and my wrist was twinging again), but I will continue to hand quilt where I think it adds to the design over the next few months.

The plan has always been to raffle the finished quilt for charity, and so that everyone who had a hand in making the quilt gets to help choose the charity we are going to hold a poll on our website and ask Last Year’s Retreaters to vote from a short list. Once tickets are ready to sell I will let everyone know here.

We can then exhibit the quilt at this year’s event and choose the raffle ticket at the end of the day. I love how this has become a kind of community arts project now!

Here is the back, I didn’t have enough of the Amy Butler fabric to match the pattern but the colours work so well that I decided not to let it annoy me too much!

It was hard to decide which category to enter this in, as the group quilt category has disappeared this year, so I have plumped for Art Quilts as each one of these tickets is a little work of art in my opinion! And somehow they’ve all worked together to produce a beautiful quilt!

I have a fantastic, and quite different idea for this year’s Stitch Gathering ticket which I am working on currently. Tickets should be landing on doormats in June and if you’d like one yourself and to take part in this year’s ticket project (as well as all the rest of the Stitch Gathering fun!) we still have some event tickets left. All the details are here.

Now head on over to the quilt festival for more quilty beauty and fun!