Festival of Quilts - antique and traditional

The Quilters Guild of the British Isles displayed a selection of quilts from the collection under the title 'Walks of Life', including the stories of the people who made them.  Some were antique, some modern.  I wish we knew about the makers of all quilts.

 This two sided quilt in the Traditional competition had one side with my Super Strips design in the centre.

This is the other side, with 3-D butterflies.

Most of the fabrics in this quilt were reprints made for the V&A's Quilts 1700 - 2010 exhibition.

A fascinating design and great hand quilting.

Great use of stripes...

Amazing traditional quilts in the Miniatures section (finger included for scale!)

Super Strips x 2

Two very different versions of my Super Strips quilt appeared on my Facebook news feed earlier today, within a few minutes of each other.  Carol Fieldhouse started hers in one of my workshops a few years ago - I'll have to dig through my workshop photos and see if I can spot which one!  It shouldn't be too difficult (I hope) as Carol has done the centre of her quilt with narrower strips, and there haven't been as many of those as the 21/2in strip centre versions. The batik fabrics make it look like a watercolour. She writes -

Howzat! A Susan Briscoe workshop, **#!!! years ago, finally quilted and bound.... it's almost all batik strips and I'm keeping it!

Margaret Cull posted a photo of her Super Strips on the UK Quilters United Facebook page a few minutes before.  This one uses all the same strip width and I'm guessing it was made from my pattern which appeared in Today's Quilter last year.  There is a small but subtle difference between the pattern and the workshop version, because the pattern has an uneven number of strips in the initial piecing, which results in a tiny quarter square triangle effect in the middle, whereas the workshop version has an even number, so there's no mini QST in the centre.  Margaret says -

Took me almost a year to get round to quilting it but I am very pleased with it. Going to be a gift for a friend.

The rich gold and blue colourscheme and the scrolling quilting designs give Margaret's quilt a rather heraldic look.

Thanks very much for permission to show your work here.

Super Strips can be made in so many different fabrics and shading variations, which I think is the mark of a versatile quilt pattern.

Llandudno AGM weekend

We had a brilliant time at The Quilters' Guild of the British Isles AGM and conference weekend, also known as 'A Celebration of Quilts'.  It seemed to go very quickly!  The photo above was made by Glyn moving one of DeAnne's quilts a bit fast, but I liked the effect.

This year had some excellent speakers and we tried to get to most of the lectures.  Magie Relph of the African Fabric Shop gave the first talk on Friday, 'African Threads'.

Our next speaker was DeAnne Hartwell-Jones, who does all her work by hand and has made several quilts using the 1718 Coverlet blocks, which she also teaches.

More of DeAnne's work.  The piece above was inspired by an iron foundry and used a few of my tsumugi stripes.

I spotted some of my tsumugi striped cotton in this patchwork too.

A version of my Super Strips quilt hanging next to the stairwell.  I can't remember who made this but I think it was begun in one of my Super Strips workshops in North Wales.

This is Dot Sherlock's version of Super Strips, started in the very first workshop at Gresford.  It is longarm quilted and the finished strips are just 3/4in wide.

We didn't bring this home - Bernina 720.  Lovely machine.

We went to the gala dinner this year.  The after dinner speaker was Lynne Edwards MBE, who had us in stitches (excuse pun) with her tales of her experiences as a quilting teacher.

 

 

I think this was the best food I have ever had at the gala dinner.   We had the vegetarian option, wild mushroom and spinach lattice.  The previous night, a big group of us went to Wetherspoons - you have to have fish & chips at the seaside.

 

More food related photos - the dining room at our hotel.  We stayed at the Hydro, a huge late Victorian (Edwardian?) hotel near the convention centre.  The dining room had a lot of Art Nouveau decoration.

The four stained glass ship windows across the front of the dining room.

Nothing very ornate in the skip though.

On Sunday, our first speaker was Effie Galletly.

The second speaker was Pauline Burbidge.  Her exhibition is opening at Ruthin Craft Centre on 23rd April.

Unfortunately we didn't have a good end to the weekend, as our car was shunted as we waited to go onto the roundabout at Junction 19 on the A55.  We all seem to have minor whiplash (I hope that's all!)