Festival of Quilts 2012

As some of you may have seen from my tweets I spent yesterday at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham.  It was a brilliant day, as always there were hundreds of stunning quilts, unfortunetly I didn't get time to see them all but I've put pics of a few of my favourites below:

I managed to visit several stalls (and spend lots of money too!).  I got some beautiful fabric from the Oakshott stall (H25), their stall was looking so bright and colourful and eye catching that I had to take a few pics.

I went over to the Brother Stand (P42) where as well as having many of their machines on display for people to try out they have textile artist Anja Townrow making a whole quilt during the show.

They also had a cute display of mini quilts which were all made using a different sewing machine foot, which was attached to the quilt.  A great way to show you how you can use the different feet.

I also popped over to the Quilt Me Happy Stand (N22) where Tracey had some lovely quilt kits on sale, as well as loads of fabric.  Luckily she's in the side hall over by the big cafe area where there are loads of chairs so when you take a break do pop by and see her. 

I also popped over to the Backstitch stand (G6) and bought some lovely Cloud 9 organic fabrics.  You can get a discount voucher on their blog so make sure you take that with you if you go (I forgot!).  I visited Janome who had a big stand right by the entrance (A53) with many of their machines available for people to try out and buy at show prices.

I also fell in love with a new sewing machine, now I just need to get saving for it!  The Elna Lotus is amazing!  I had posted about it on the site here but trying it out in person I found it was even more amazing than I realised.  You can use it without a foot pedal, there's a really simple speed control, and a button for everything (to tie the sewing off, to cut the thread, to stop and start, stitch choice etc) and you don't even need to guide the fabric through the machine - it does everything for you.  The lazy girl's sewing machine :-)









One of the first people I saw was Ruth from Stone Creek Silks (stand G55) who had the lovely quilt below on display and as well as advertising her sewing classes was also selling some beautiful hand dyed fabrics which I just had to buy some of.

Plus Ruth is an expert at printing digital images onto fabric and kindly gave me the fabric below which she had printed a sunset onto.



She also gave me a copy of her book Digital Imagery onto Fabric (we reviewed it here) to giveaway so if you'd like to win a copy please just leave a comment below to tell me what image you would like to print onto fabric. I'll pick a winner next Friday so you have until 6pm Friday 24th August to enter (UK & Ireland only).

Win this book

Last but not least here's a few pics of my haul.  Fabric from Backstitch, Stone Creek Silks, Oakshott and Cookes Quilting, 3d cross stitch kit from Meg Evershed, embroidery thread from Oliver Twists and textile art from Yvonne Brown.

I'm a bit of a sucker for textile art so I ended up buying a notebook and picture from textile artist Yvonne Brown and the blue needlebook at the front I won in the Quilter's Guild's raffle.  There was a great selection of textile art and quilt art available to buy at the show.

I also managed to squeeze in a few meet ups with people I've met through the site and through Twitter  - Sewlittletosay, Undomsci, Madewithlovebym and Rainbow Disks.

All in all it was a brilliant, if somewhat exhausting day!  I think one year I'll have to go for 2 days and then I might have time to look around all of the show, it's spread over 3 halls of the NEC so is a lot to try and cover in a few hours.