Festival of Quilts 2011- 1

I returned from the Festival of Quilts late last night, having stayed for all four days....a much nicer hotel this year, near Solihull. The traffic was busier this year, and I didn't arrive until Thursday lunchtime.

The Christchurch Bell quilt looked well and was hanging on one of the solid walls. The judges thought the colours were "well balanced" and that it was a "lovely unusual design idea". One judge liked the quilting around the edge but the other didn't think the green rayon thread worked as a colour.

Here is the sawtooth quilt - again hung against a solid wall. The judges remarks - good variety of quilting designs well executed - well done -lovely quilt. But one judge didn't like the originality or design and gave low marks. It just shows that the modern sensibility is quite different from that prevailing when the top was made. I made a decision not to amend the design, colours or quilting motifs and although I could have "improved" it, it was simply a recreation of an older quilt.

Here is a lovely North Country quilt that was hanging behind our BQSG stand. The quilt was found at a textile fair and had no provenance - we guessed the date to be 20's or 30's. It attracted lots of attention. The quilting patterns are unusual and the quilting unusually fine and dense. One morning a member of BQSG said that she was familiar with the patterns, as they came from a pattern sheet published by the Durham Womens' institute. If one could find out when these patterns were first published, it would give a rough idea of the date of the quilt. Pauline thought that one edge had no wadding and had "the edge" although a hand sewn one, not a machine sewn one. The piecing on the quilt is all by hand. It may be a WI quilting class item - the WI was very persnickety about hand sewing and this is all hand sewn, even the edge. However it seems that the quilter was not very experienced - what we assumed to be seams in the outer border were in fact large 1/2" pleats on the far side, where fullness of the fabric had been quilted over - there was some puckering on the far edge as well.

This was probably meant to be a wedding quilt, as it has a true lovers knot at the centre plus lots of hearts. There are some rather unusual pots of flowers as well. Presumably the Durham WI copied patterns from local quilters, some of which might have been passed down and were therefor quite old.

Considering that we originally knew nothing about this quilt, close inspection and the knowledge of a quilter have raised some interesting leads.

I have more photos of the FOQ quilts to share in further posts.