Festival of Quilts - by Chrissie

I visited the show on the opening day with a friend - we drove up from Wiltshire to arrive at 10am and with pre-booked tickets so that we could avoid the queues.

I was immediately attracted to a group display of LEGIT quilts near the main entrance, all foundation paper pieced and available to buy as kits. The quilt of Michelangelo’s sculpture “David” was astonishingly intricate and double sided so that the reverse of the quilt was the back view of the sculpture. We then dived in to the competition quilts where the standard was amazingly high - it seems to improve year on year as more techniques and ideas appear. The Original Design section was a new category this year and included two fabulous quilts by our treasurer Nicky - great work Nicky!  (See below)

The exhibition is huge with over 1,200 quilts on display and despite being there all day we didn’t have time to see everything. The winning quilts were unveiled in the afternoon and were all amazing. I had two favourites, the Pictorial Quilt winner by Sue Sherman “Where’s the Tipping Point?” that focused on climate change and habit loss was one. The Miniature Quilt winner, also by Sue Sherman was a delight - “Penguins All Around” it featured painted penguins and teeny tiny piecing. I was gobmacked to read that this was a miniature version of a Queen sized quilt that Sue made a few years ago. The hand quilting was the tiniest stitching I have ever seen.

The traders were there in abundance as usual and we had to take some time to visit the stalls with our shopping lists. There were many famous faces there, I spotted Janet Clare, Kate Findlay and Jen Kingwell amongst others. We also saw Ricky Tims as his prize winning quilt “The Visitation” was on display. It was fascinating to see details of his work method for such a complex piece. I was quite heartened to find out that a large part of the machine quilting was done on a Bernina machine model that is even older than my trusty Bernina 1090.

All in all, a fabulous day although very tiring. Well worth the trip, although next year we might consider visiting over two days to get the best experience possible. As well as the displays and the traders there were a huge number of workshops and talks happening but not enough hours in the day!