Festival of Quilts, part two: Stalls and demonstrations

The exhibition stands, demonstration areas and classes at the Festival of Quilts give you oodles of inspiration and then you are set free to spend to your heart’s content on fabric and supplies at the many shop stalls at the event.  There is a stall for absolutely everything and even knitting shops have started to creep into the show, which as a knitter, I must say I found rather appealing.  You will probably never see so much fabric in one place and for a fabric addict like myself it’s a very dangerous place to be.  I’m very familiar with a lot of the quilting fabric ranges though so I spent the day hunting out those extra special fabrics and crafts that I can’t readily get my hands on.

Magee

Magee was my favourite fabric stand of the day.  Magee Clothing are a woven textiles company from Donegal in Ireland and the company has been trading since 1866.  The woven fabrics were just beautiful but there were so many people around the stand that it was difficult to get a proper look at all of the cloth for sale.  What I did see I loved though and I could have spent a small fortune on enough tweed to keep me in clothes for all of the Winter.  Instead I settled for a few fat quarters of striking Red and Teals.

Alice Caroline

Alice Caroline had a huge quantity of Liberty fabrics and the section you can see at the front of this photo was their £1 per piece area.  I succumbed to two fabrics that caught my eye including the ‘A Boy Dreams’ fabric designed by Graham Coxon, that I was desperately hunting down on ebay a few months ago.

Emily Peacock

Emily Peacock

I was delighted to find Emily Peacock exhibiting at the show as I have only ever seen her kits on the internet and in magazines.  I wasn’t prepared for how beautiful they are in real life and I wanted to take home ALL of the kits she had on display.  I was particularly taken with The Heart tapestry, King and Queen cushions and her Welcome Banner.  I couldn’t resist buying a kit for myself and so went home with the Think Happy Thoughts kit.  Emily was a thoroughly delightful lady to chat to and was interested in knowing which kits I liked, although that was a hard question to answer for all the reasons stated above!

Virtual Studio by Committed to Cloth

The Virtual Studio was the room I revisited the most throughout the day so I could sample the many different textile crafts that were being demonstrated by Committed to Cloth. I saw mono-printing and dyeing as well as many kinds of mark making on fabric and I also saw some thermofax and screen printing.  As a screen printer it’s always interesting to watch other people demonstrating the method, especially in such an exciting, immediate and experimental way. Here are just a few of the shots I got of the area and the demonstrations, a lot of the finished pieces can be seen hanging in the background.

One thing I couldn’t help but be drawn to was the drop cloth on the demonstration tables.  I went back right at the end of the day and photographed some of the patterns that were created after a full day of textile crafts, here are a selection are my favourites:

I had meant to write just two posts on the Festival of Quilts but I have that much to share that I’ve decided to leave the write-up of the Kaffe Fassett lecture until tomorrow instead.