Ready for The Festival of Quilts

Tomorrow I am going to Birmingham for the Festival of Quilts. I am really looking forward to it. Last time I went to FoQ was in 2015!

This time I have actually entered two quilts in the exhibition! The one on the left I have entered in one of the juried categories, not that I would have expected to win anything. But it cost the same and I thought it would be interesting to see the feedback the quilt would get.

Last year, I shared a few of the panels from the quilt on the right. Back then I wasn’t entirely sure that I would send it to FoQ but I decided that I would because why not? And I think it is important to share these things in all kinds of fora. It will be interesting to hear people’s reactions to this quilt. I may have to hang around it to eavesdrop on people’s conversations… :-)

Here is the whole thing. I am quite happy with how it turned out. I was a bit worried that all the different panels wouldn’t work well together but I think they do.

Putting the panels together introduced me to a new to me technique. Since the panels had become quilted in the process of making them, I had to treat this as a quilt as you go project. Once I had trimmed the panels to the right size, I had to trim off 1/4″ of the wadding all the way around each panel so I could sew the fabric together and the wadding would come together at the seams. It worked really well. And then I just added a line all around the edge of each panel to quilt it to the back of the quilt.

It took me ages to figure out what to do for the binding but in the end I decided that it would be look better to face it (basically a wider binding that is folded to the back) and I am really happy with the result.

Right, I’ll report back about my FoQ adventures! :-)