My favourite quilts at Harrogate

This first quilt is made by my friend Joan. It was made for her Grandaughter to celebrate family holidays in Southwold. Hence it is called 'The Southwold Quilt'. It is completely hand made, pieced, appliqued and quilted.
I was disappointed that the judges did not recognise the skill that had gone into this quilt. I did manage to persuade Joan to enter and I am really glad she did - the quilt looked stunning Joan!

My other favourite is this traditional tumbling blocks quilt made by Gill Young. I have a love hate relationship with tumbling blocks and I will make one someday probably for my eldest son who loves this design and used it in his graphic design studies.
When I go to quilt shows there are some quilts which just shout out to me and this was one of them.

Here is a close up - as you can see the black diamond is always in the same position but the others seem to be completely random.
This quilt won the award for Scrap Quilt and Judges Merit.

Harrogate Quilt Show

Last Friday I visited the Harrogate Quilt Show which is much smaller and very different from the Festival of Quilts. I just wish that the only two quilt shows that I attend regularly were more than two weeks apart.
I exhibited three quilts in the show - no rosettes this year but I was pleased to see my quilts on display. The quilt above has been on the blog a few months ago but I only got it finished in time for the show. I really like it probably because I love improvisational piecing but I know a lot of quilters just don't get it! All the fabric started as a pale blue and white stripe but I overdyed it in all those bright colours. It is a medallion style quilt - another one of my favourites.

The second quilt was in the cot quilt category and you haven't seen this one before. It started as a sample for my Tuesday classes and then grew from there. The stars are liberated and the whole quilt is quite heavily quilted as a FMQ workshop sample. All the quilts that got rosettes in this category were very traditional this year so obviously mine didn't fit in.

The final quilt was my black and white miniature quilt that you have seen before.

I haven't shown many cat photos recently so I thought I would share this one of Gizmo helping me quilt the striped quilt!

My favourite gallery at Festival of Quilts - DeAnne Hartwell-Jones

As promised here are photos of quilts from my favourite gallery - welsh quilts by DeAnne Hartwell-Jones. As you may know I love Welsh medallion quilts and this lady is a prolific maker of them and the amazing thing is that they are all hand made, mostly by the piecing over papers method.
The other great thing is that she also makes quilts out of the traditional Welsh wool and guess who came home with two big bags of offcuts from the Welsh woollen mills?

Here you can see the papers still in the back of this quilt.

This lovely quilt is made from Welsh wool flannel, lovely colours and great use of striped fabric.

Lots of lovely medallion quilts.

This courthouse steps quilt is also made out of Welsh wool - foundation pieced by hand.

So much inspiration for me to make my own Welsh Quilt - I have three planned in my head already!