Festival of Quilts 2022

It’s time for my annual report about Festival of Quilts. This year I spent two days there (Thursday and Friday) as there were two lectures I wanted to hear on the Friday afternoon and I thought just half a day would not be sufficient to see the quilts and do some shopping.

Train strikes were planned on the Thursday and Saturday which affected many people’s plans. I had to travel to Birmingham a day early, but had no problems getting trains to/from Birmingham New Street and Birmingham International on the Thursday. It was difficult to judge the crowds, but Friday was busier than Thursday, probably due to the train strike. As with last year, the show was spread over 4 halls which makes comparison with pre-Covid years tricky but I got the impression it was still not back to pre-COVID numbers, however, it was nice to hear some international voices again.

This year the workshops, galleries and VIP lounge were in Hall 6, the traders were in Halls 7 and 8, and the quilts were displayed in part of Hall 9. There were more traders than last year and the space between the stalls was maintained at last year’s level. Some of the bigger names returned this year, but there were still a few notable absences which is perhaps why there was plenty of seating scattered around the halls.

I was quite focussed with my shopping* and even though I was unlucky in my quest to get some background fabric for the Cats in Space quilt, I did get some metallic fabrics for the space suits and helmets and some suitable fabric for ginger cats. I picked up some useful things at the Project Linus stand including a couple of fabric marking pens, some vintage Sylko reels for display and an odd shaped remnant of a low volume fabric which is the equivalent to 3 FQs and I think it is Moda Grunge. I also picked up a few bits as prizes in the Quilts for Care Leavers raffle – a magnetic telescopic pick up stick, a FQ and a bobbin keeper. My best bargains were two packs of Warm & Natural twin sized quilt wadding which were £5 each on the P&Q magazine stand which I think must have been subscription gifts at some point. Even allowing for the 59p large carrier bag I had to get to carry them home in, it is still a saving of ~£20 per pack! I also picked up a few pieces of red and cream fabrics with a hint of Christmas from there and it was quite sad to see all the clearance items and back issues on the stand and everyone was saying that the magazine will be missed. I didn’t buy any Liberty fabric this year, but I did get some free quilt patterns from the Liberty stand which may help me use my stash.

 

The display of the quilts was a bit more irregular than previously with the wooden display frames arranged in short zig-zag formations at various angles which, for me, made it more difficult to view them in a methodical manner. All of the quilts can be viewed on the FoQ website and you have until Friday 9^th September to vote for the Visitors’ Choice. As the quilts can be viewed online, rather than include lots of photos of quilts in this post, I will show a few of the competition quilts caught my eye and gave me ideas that I might like to try.

MD41, Sampling Modernity, Linda Chevell

 

TD33, Japanese Log Cabin, Chris Harvey

 

MD22, Airspace, Kathleen Anderson

 

The two lectures were both excellent - one was about the Liberty archive by Anna Buruma, Head Archivist at Liberty and the other was about the shoddy trade and was by Jo Andrews of Haptic and Hue. Another excellent attraction was the gallery of quilts by Sarah Hibbert (@quiltscornerstone on Instagram). I liked her use of neutral linen fabrics and as I have quite a lot of "linen type" fabric I got from Abakhan's ages ago I might be tempted to use more of it.

 

Unlike many previous years, I came away from this year’s trip with some inspiration and some ideas to try. I’m still not tempted to make a show quilt and a story to go with it, and instead will stick to making quilts for family, friends and charity.

* All purchases had to pass feline inspection while I was trying to take a photo.

 

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A magical birthday quilt

About four weeks before the event, I realised a friend’s significant birthday was approaching and I needed to make something special for it. Fortunately, this coincided with her telling me of a recent Harry Potter themed weekend away and me buying some Harry Potter FQs in a supermarket with a view to making a quilt for Project Linus. The FQs were repurposed, some more Harry Potter fabrics bought, a few days taken off work and I managed to get a quilt made in time for the big day.

The feature fabrics are framed in churn dashes and I left plenty of negative space for two types of quilting. The main quilting is straight-line quilting inside the churn dashes and free motion “stars and squiggles” meandering around the churn dashes. For the largest churn dashes, a few stars were added to keep the layers together.

In the negative spaces I quilted Harry Potter associated words by printing the words onto thin paper and stitching through the paper around each letter. To make the word stand out a little, I used Aurifil 28wt thread whereas the “stars and squiggles” used Aurifil 40wt thread.

I even put a label of sorts on the back of the quilt, though the quilt police would probably tell me off for not including my name.

Now this has been handed over to a very happy Harry Potter fan, I can go back to my original plan of making a Project Linus quilt as there is plenty of fabric remaining.

* This was not an entirely solo effort - I did receive the usual feline assistance.

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From floor tile to mini quilt

This month’s sewing has been for an online challenge to make a patchwork block inspired by pictures of tiles.

The house in which I grew up had a tiled hall and I managed to find an old photo of it. I knew the tiles were likely made by Maw & Co of Jackfield and via Google I was able to find an old pattern book of their "Geometric and Roman Mosaics Encaustic Tile Pavements". Looking at the pattern book, it would suggest our hall was pattern number 29 but with a slight variation on the border to make it narrower.

 

Even though there are various options for a quilt block in the main part of the floor, I decided to make the corner embellishment shown in the pattern book using FPP templates.

 

Each FPP square finished at 2” and were not too complicated to make. However, there was quite a bit of cursing and unpicking after I had sewn the squares together and realised that blocks with long black triangles were facing the wrong way.

 

Once everything was facing the correct way, I added a 1” border and quilted it using stitching nearly in the ditch. With a half inch binding, the finished size is ~9”.

 

(While looking at the photo of the hall floor for this project, I spotted a mistake in the border tiles that must have been there since the floor was laid, but went unnoticed all the time I was living there.)

 

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Tea for the Jubilee

I recently took part in an online Jubilee sewing challenge which had the theme of “British” and “Royalty”. After a bit of thinking, I decided to make a tea set given that a cup of tea is often associated with “Britishness”.

I found a free teapot pattern on Youtube, but I had just three pieces of fabric with a London or red/white/blue royal theme and each were only ~24cm square.

To make the fabric go further, I used contrasting fabric for part of the teapot and saucers but even with the contrasting fabrics, I still had to resize the pattern resulting in lots of teapot and teacup toiles.

To make the teapot and teacups stand up, I used two layers of cotton and one layer of quilting batting. Some additional interfacing was used in the teapot lid and piping cord was added to the handles. The binding and decorations on the teapot were chosen to reflect a red, white and blue theme.

These were quite fun to make, but fiddly in parts and now I have no idea what to do with them.

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Quilting Part 2

The criss-cross quilt is finished, washed and ready to go to Project Linus.

As expected, my plans to use some free motion quilting in the criss-cross sections changed and I used a serpentine stitch instead, using different colours of thread to match with the different fabrics. I didn’t want the rows of stitching to run parallel to each other, so I changed the stitch length on every other row which helped make them out of sync.
 

I’m really pleased with the texture of the quilting and the contrasting styles, which shows up particularly well on the back of the quilt.

 

Now I need to decide on what to start next.

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Quilting Part 1

I was a bit optimistic when I thought I might manage to finish the quilting and binding this month. However, progress has been made and the grey sections have been quilted with straight line stitching.

 

My stash of Aurifil 40wt was lacking in the right colours for the criss-cross sections but fortunately they do a “Colour Builder” collection which has three very useful colours for this quilt.

I think I might try some free motion quilting in the criss-cross sections, but like most of my plans, this may be subject to change.

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Quilt Progress

A flurry of activity during one weekend saw good progress being made on the Criss-Cross quilt. There was some sewing followed by lots of pinning resulting in a sandwiched quilt.

 

Hopefully next month will be a time for quilting and binding.

 

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