The best day out - EVER!

Hello! I hope you are all well. There is a little bit of sunshine where I am at the moment which is lovely and cheery. I even popped outside and did a little bit of dead-heading this morning, lovely. Very calm and peaceful. Not at all like yesterday.

Yesterday I went on a little day trip. I had been getting excited about this trip for a while! I packed myself a lunch (I'm totally lying, M&S packed my lunch for me!) and I met up with 2 lovely friends, who had suggested and organised the trip, at the train station. We did some excited giggling, even though we are grown ups! Then our train pulled into the station and we found our seats (we booked seats which I think proves we are grown ups!) We chatted, we clapped our hands excitedly, we wondered what awaited us at the other end of our journey.

Finally the 40 min journey was over and we had arrived at the NEC in Birmingham for the Festival of Quilts!

I just need to take a moment here to share with you the reactions I have had to those 3 words. Say "Festival of Quilts" at our Thursday evening knitting group and you'll here lots of "oohs" and "aahs" and "won't that be super". Say "Festival of Quilts" to Mr T and he nearly falls off his chair laughing. Explain that we are going on the Thursday because we think it will be the least busy day and he rolls around some more saying that NO day will be busy, ha, ha, ha! Hmmm, thanks very much :(

Anyway - us 3 very excited would-be quilters were thrilled to be at the NEC. We all have some quilting experience and were keen to get some more ideas, and stock up on supplies! We weren't really prepared for the scale of the "festival" though. We walked in and realised that if we wanted to get round the WHOLE exhibition we would have to run and not stop to look at anything! That certainly was not going to happen! So we spent quite a few hours wandering up and down, marvelling at quilts, wanting very much to touch and squidge the quilts, but not being allowed :( I took a lot of pictures. I'd love to show them all to you but fear I may bore you silly. So here are just a few,

Very pretty hexagon patchwork quilt.



Sunshiny yellow patchwork stars.



Sweet quilted seaside houses.

Amazing quilted scenes of Britain.

These last 2 quilts are miniature quilts. Never have I seen such tiny pieces of fabric patched together, with such perfect, tiny, neat stitches! And then quilted just as finely. Each quilt was maybe only 20cm squared. Amazing. I'm going to have a go! See the miniature log cabin on the right hand side? There was a lovely lady making another the same and she showed me what she was doing, how she constructed all those weeny bits of fabric. And then she gave me a template! So kind, so helpful. I'm so excited to get started!

Of course, as well as quilts to admire and gather inspiration from there were stalls selling crafty goodies. I think there must have been a million of them. Certainly far too many for me to visit in 1 day, which is probably just as well, my purse would not have coped! I didn't really have anything that I needed, or particularly wanted to buy. I have signed up for a quilting course in October and I do need A LOT of fabric for that, but I decided that I needed to be much calmer for such a massive (expensive) fabric buying session. However, I still managed to make a fair few purchases!

At the top of the photo you can see a pack of pre-cut paper hexagons for patchwork, and 3 packs of scraps for practising my quilting skills on! I love bags of scraps, so exciting! The first one has really small, narrow strips and I'm going to use these for my log cabin mini-quilt. If you look carefully you can even see the paper template the lovely kind lady gave me! The middle row of the photo is some fabric for a secret project :) The bottom row has some low volume fabric which I bought just because I liked it (and it was a bargain!) and finally a fat quarter of red/pink fabric that looks like patchwork. I bought this to practise machine quilting on - I don't like the thought of making a piece of patchwork this size and then stuffing it up by quilting it badly!!

Before we knew it the tannoy voice was telling us it was 5.30 and the show was closed. We were sad. We wanted to stay. We are planning on going again next year. For 2 days instead of 1!!!

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I just quickly want to show you another finished WIP before I go. This is the bunting I made for Miss M's bedroom. She is still on holiday so hopefully this will be a nice surprise for her when she gets back later tonight :)

Pink, pink, pink!



I love it! Pretty bunting xx

Wishing you all a lovely weekend! See you soon xxxx