Quilt Festival

Hello Everyone

The Bi- Annual National Quilt Festival was held close to my home in Stellenbosch, South Africa last week and I thought I would share some of the beautiful entries with you.  Not embroidery, but Quilters often use embroidery to embellish their quilts and I do feel that the two are closely linked and sure we can all appreciate the amount of work that goes into creating these works of art.  The Festival always includes three main categories Traditional, Innovative and Art and  the participants enter their quilts into a category suitable for their quilt to be judged in.  This year the overall theme was ALIVE WITH COLOUR, there were approx 500 entries and the myriad variety on display was a visual feast!  Here are a few of the entries – you can view more of the quilts and the winning entries here

http://www.quiltsouthafrica.co.za/

Of particular interest to me were two quilts:  One was a quilt dedicated to Norma Young who sadly passed on about a year ago.  Norma became a good friend of mine when I moved to South Africa, and the lady responsible for most of my involvement in the South African embroidery scene.  This feisty little lady would never take no for an answer and despite my being a somewhat shy person she appeared on my doorstep two days after I arrived and dragged me off to the embroidery guild in Cape town, arranged classes for me to teach and introduced me to the Ighali Convention.   Norma was a great organizer and behind the scenes of every event that happened in the embroidery and quilters’ world.  A group of her dear friends created this quilt in her memory – the catalogue entry read:

“Dedicated to Norma and our countless forbears who developed and quilted the stories of their lives in the beautiful Baltimore style.”

The second quilt was created by two friends of mine Merle Clarence & Frances Chittenden who stitched  this beautiful, modern interpratation of a Jacobean design quilt.

I must confess to being intrigued by some of the work being created on embroidery machines, which the numerous vendors had on display.  The lady was chatting and having a cup of tea while her machine earnestly created beautiful pieces of work.  I enviously thought of the many hours I spend sitting in my chair stitching one little area that a machine can do in minutes.  Of course no machine can capture the detail of a hand embroidered piece but none the less still tempting – imagine all the Christmas presents I could make in just one week!

Have a wonderful week and happy stitching hours.  Trish