This year sees the 20th anniversary of the largest quilt show in Europe, the Festival of Quilts, which takes place at the NEC in Birmingham.
To help celebrate this milestone, there will be a Winning Quilt Retrospective Gallery featuring 36 quilts from the large number of winning quilts over the last two decades.
I'm super-excited that one of my quilts, Crystal Dreams, has been selected to be part of that exhibition.
That double bed-sized wholecloth quilt won both the Traditional and Hand-Quilting categories in 2007; it is embellished with beadwork and also colonial knotwork in addition to the hand-quilting.
I recently fell in love with the colours of Oakshott Fabric’s new Alpine range. As Oakshott fabric is lovely to hand quilt, I decided to make something with a fat ⅛ths bundle but ended up getting additional fabric to extend the design into a cot quilt.
Designs and fabric packs for this quilt or its accompanying cushion can be found at the bottom of my "friends" page on the Oakshott website.
I have started to put up quilt-making videos on my YouTube Channel
They are also accessible via the Quilting Videos link in the menu bar above.
This year's exhibition at the Welsh Quilt Centre
of antique quilts from Jen Jone's collection is amazing, but unfortunately it is the last.
However, the Centre will continue its conservation/restoration work, so I have made a traditional, hand-quilted, Welsh flannel cot quilt for them to
raffle in support of that important activity.
An hour-long video detailing the making of the flannel quilt is being shown at the centre, and raffle tickets are on sale there.
Many of my paisley-themed quilts (up to 43 depending on the size of the venue) are currently appearing at a number of UK quilt shows organised by Grosvenor Shows, including QuiltsUK in Malvern.
Check out their website for further details.
My third exhibition of paisley-themed cot quilts took place in 2022 at the Welsh Quilt Centre in Lampeter, West Wales.
The exhibition comprised 25 cot quilts, 17 of them new designs, and was accompanied by videos showing in detail how one of them was made (those videos
can now be seen here on my website, either via the Quilting Videos link in the above navigation-bar, or via this link).
In addition, you can see a video of a quick, 3 min tour around my gallery by clicking this Play button...
(NB the design animations playing on the TV in the video are available for each quilt in the exhibition via the My Quilts > Paisley Collections > Paisley Pageant links at the top of the page).
I don't like entering quilts into shows at which I'm judging, so I haven't entered many in recent years. However, the opportunity arose to enter
a couple of my recent quilts into the Harrogate show in 2022, and I was fortunate enough to win in a number of categories...