Festival of Quilts

Well I am back home from the festival and thought it was about time I did some blogging. Val Sarah Vinnie and I went up to Birmingham early on Wednesday, all a bit excited about being invited to exhibit at the festival. We were guided to the unloading area which was not too far from the stand and unloaded. The building was a hive of activity with sack trucks, crates packaging everywhere. We came very well equipped with two hammers and at least three spirit levels. Vinnie and Sarah started drilling, hammering and drawing lines with the aid of the spirit levels, while Val and I stuck Velcro squares on the backs of the write ups and smaller calendar pieces. Sarah and Vinnie had to keep dashing away to try and move their cars to the car park but never managed as they were boxed in. Luckily we were able to just get out at the end of the day. The space looked tiny when we arrived but as soon as we started hanging our work it seamed to grow. We were all pleased with how it looked.
Thursday arrived and we got there in good time. Everything was neat and tidy (there must have been an awful lot of hoovering during the night) The quilts looked fantastic. The judging had been done. Vinnie had got the bronze award in the Contemporary class. We had a hard job keeping her under control after that. We were so proud of her, she's a little star.
I met so many people that I knew and saw a few as they walked by. For those of you that have not been it is a huge event and believe me it is quite easy to walk round and round one area and completely miss other areas without even knowing it till you get home and read the catalogue. I was there for three days and did not see it all. On Thursday I know there were 10,000 people there. I have not heard the numbers for the other days but they felt busier.
We had a lot of really nice comments and it was also nice to see so many people from other countries. We met people from Holland, Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain, America, Canada, New Zealand and I noticed quite a few from Ireland too and I know at least one Welsh person was there even if I didn't see her!
I am very tired now. I think it is all catching up with me. I will put some pictures up of our exhibition so that you can have a little insight into what it was like.