Festival of Quilts 2013

Straight to the good stuff - all my photos are here if you want to have a good look by yourself without my commentary. If you want to hear what I thought of it...read on!

My personal best-in-show? I am going to split it. In no particular order we have Out of Africa.

As you can see in this close up...

...this is made up of triangles sewn into hexagons. However they all use just one fabric print - I love that. So clever! I find this very inspiring. Then we have Little Stars.

I am a big fan of paper piecing and this is diamonds, triangles and parallelograms.

Impressive. I'd not considered paralllelllograms before. Then we have a quilt with a funny name which is on Flickr if you want to know it.

I loved the movement in it. This is also very inspiring - could there be a HUGE paper pieced quilt in my near future?! Another one I mean.

As usual I did look forward to the miniature quilts and I thought this shot gave a good idea of just how mini some of these miniatures really are.

On a tiny quilt...

...you get tiny stitches.

Puts my great gallumphing sashiko stitches to shame! Back to the big quilts and this one is made entirely of old ties.

This one was enormous - that wall is about 10ft high.

I am not going to show any more since they are all on Flickr but I did deliberately take fewer photos than last year which gave me more time to focus on the ones I really liked.

Mumsy and I also managed a little shopping although we were remarkably restrained. I now know what it means to have your fingers itching. There were SO many lovely things and I wanted to bring them all home with me but budget and potential moves kept me holding back. The only fabric I bought was for the ten (TEN) xmas stockings I will soon begin. I didn't want to go with the traditional bright red, gold and green so started off with the snowman print, then added a few others, then a few more until I had the final bundle.

So it is still kinds red, green and gold. But not..I mean..you know...better. I also got a knitting kit for a shawl Mater admired which she tells me is to her only xmas present.

We'll see. On the way to and from Birmingham I was at work on my Pop Pots shawl - the edging will begin soon! Knit, knit, knit...

Fabric

It is the Festival of Quilts this week and I will be attending with my Mum once again. I always take lots and lots of lovely photos and then mull over them in the following year. Last year's are here on Flickr and very well mulled.

It will be a strange one for me this year as I'm destashing. The only thing I 'need' and that is christmas fabric for stockings. So I guess I'll be focussing more on the exhibition.

Despite not adding to my stash I had a voucher for the Fat Quarter Shop which I got before I knew about a potential move. I love that shop as even though they are in America they are very understanding when it comes to posting to the UK. This is what I spent it on.

I set myself a little challenge to put together a bundle I could make a complete quilt with in a colour range that I liked but wouldn't usually go for. I think I got it ok although I'm not sure about that green one. It's always so hard to tell on screen.

I haven't felt like doing much crafting this week other than plugging away on the popspots shawl. There are more than 500 stitches per row now so perhaps it makes sense that in contrast I've turned back to some Sashiko.

This is one of the pre-printed squares you can get from EuroJapanLinks and other places. I do prefer the ones with curves and find it aids Mindfulness (deliberate capitalisation there) and reflection. The only thing is what to do with them afterwards! I feel this one might become a bag.

Weekend of Giving and Receiving

My epic stash sort out and second round of book listing has resulted in 70+ lots being listed on ebay. Everything starts at 99p so go and grab yourself something wonderful. This is the stash pre-clearout.

I'll show you what it looks like in 10 days time.

With the way Royal Mail now calculate postage, anything more than 8cm thick costs over £5 to post. So all those 100g single balls were never going to sell plus there were various bits and bobs I thought others might enjoy. That saw me with an IKEA bag full of stash and notions heading to the Romford Group today. I came home without it which is a win for me! Plus the people there got a few goodies each and the rest has gone to EssexGirlKnits's school group. I didn't come away empty handed though. My birthday present from Nickerjac!

So many amazing embroidery transfers and in *excellent* condition despite being more than 70 years old. I still need to go through them all properly this evening but a few jumped out at me.

Book 1 and 2 plus this initial book. Gorgeous! Plus you see a lot of versions of the grown up bonnet lady - but this is the first I've seen of a junior version.

I am soooooo lucky!

I was rather delighted to get these. I found them very comforting. I had been trying to explain how it made me feel to be having such a drastic destash of my stash as well as my books. I can remember buying all of that yarn and the aspirations I had for this skein or that skein. I had expected to use it up gradually over the next decade or two and to add to it as time went on. It was a history of things I had done and places I had been over the last 10+ years. Once it's gone it's as if those memories have gone. I needed to mourn the loss of all those potential items I would have knitted. Pooch did not understand. "You can get more." was his response. And yes, if it was just yarn and not memories too then I could. I guess it's hard for anyone who doesn't knit to get it. And for any sewer reading this, it'll be my fabric stash next. Although that isn't emotive and there isn't as much to go through. Maybe I should have done that first?!