Free to Quilt: October 2023

Comberton Quilters scoop 1st Place at Festival Of Quilts 2023

What's going on in my Pink Studio now?

This Year's Festival was amazing in so many ways:

I don't have the luxury of getting there by coach with the ladies from Elstree any more and the drive to the NEC was wet and wild - more like a November day than early August. But I enjoyed the company of 2 new friends Janet and Patricia, from the Childswickham group.

The first thing I saw when I arrived were these 'Sew a Row' quilts that I had made with the Comberton group. Jean Hall led this project at Connecting Threads several years ago, and it was great fun to do it again with a new crowd.

Liz and Pete Holpin of Pinhole Quilting (UK Handiquilter distributers) had used them to decorate their stand!

Then of course there was our group quilt, a slightly modified version of Edyta Sitar's 'Quilters Patch'. I had won the pattern book in a Connecting Threads raffle a few years back and was so pleased when we decided to do it as a group. I doubt I would have got round to it by myself. I had many of the original fabrics from her Silver Linings collection and so we were quite close to the original. We heard that we had won the group category on the Thursday and Pauline, Marlene (who quilted it so beautifully) and several of the other group members were there to pick up the plaque from Stuart Hillard at the award ceremony.

I enjoyed the rest of the exhibition with some stunning quilts on display, although seeing pictures online afterwards, I didn't see them all. Mostly I enjoyed meeting up with my chums from Hertfordshire and came home with a pile of tops to finish off.

But perhaps the biggest surprise of the day was that I only made ONE purchase --- and it wasn't even pink!! A hammock to hold the wadding under my frame while I'm quilting.

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Back in April, one of my friends casually mentioned that she had "seen my quilt" in the Forge Mill Needle Museum in Redditch. So I trundled off with my friend Sandra to check it out and was astonished to see 'Scrappy Stars', which I entered into FOQ in 2015, proudly hanging on display. I had sold it to a textile tutor from Coventry, Jane Cobbett, and it was on loan from her collection, complete with a little blurb I had written about how I made it. I had no idea it was there!

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So what am I up to now? Well the pile from Birmingham is about finished. Look at these beauties from Val Jefferies!

And this beautiful HAND PIECED (not EPP) Double Wedding Ring by Janet Swallow who didn't want me to quilt feathers on it!!! I might have to make one myself now 😆