This is the last post from me for this year about the Festival.  It seems everyone is talking about quilts, not least because they heard about the Festival on the radio.  Chris Evans who has a morning talk show on BBC Radio 2 did an interview with Helen Marriott on the subject on 11 August 2017. He seemed astonished that visitors might spend a whole four days at the festival.  He compared the show to the huge outdoor music festival Glastonbury, by calling our event ‘Quiltonbury’. You can listen to the interview here.

Photo source: BBC

One of the highlights for me this time was hearing Philippa Naylor demonstrating on the Bernina stand. This was a free demonstration, open to anyone who had a ticket that day and it was brilliant. I’ve twice had the opportunity to be at a workshop of Philippa’s, the first on ‘accurate piecing’ and the second specifically on ‘curved piecing’. She is a skilled and generous teacher and on this occasion, as she created free-machine motifs in red thread on white fabric, she threw out (witty) advice, tips and information to the assembled crowd.

Philippa won the first prize in the ‘Miniatures’ category at the Festival, and her quilt was also awarded ‘Best in Show’.  You can see a photo of the quilt and those of winners in other categories here.

Additional humorous delights of the show included quilts made by Moira Neal. In particular, her interpretation of the word ‘free’, centring around the freedom to be oneself over the age of sixty, including the provision of a free bus pass at the age of ’62 and three quarters’ gave me a lot of pleasure. This quilt won third prize in The Quilters’ Guild Challenge.

Moira is giving a talk to Region 15E of The Quilters’ Guild (the North-East) on 14 October 2017 – I’m so looking forward to it.

And then, on another quite different note, there was ‘The Women’s Quilt’ which commemorated all the 598 women killed by their partners between 2009 and 2015.

The idea for the quilt was conceived by Roxanne Ellis (who is a Labour Councillor) when she read statistics published by the charity ‘Women’s Aid’. Click here to read an informative post about the quilt, written in March this year in ‘Labour Rose’. This quilt personalises these tragic events, because each woman is named.   It was very moving.