This weekend I am writing to you from the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, England. It is the biggest quilt festival in Europe, and quilters come from all over Europe, and indeed from across the globe, to participate in this public show.
eQuilter is a sponsor of the Pictorial Quilt category here, and this year it has over 60 entries from 13 different countries! These include entries from: Australia, Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Israel, Germany, Norway, Netherlands, Romania, Spain and Switzerland.
This year is very international with approximately 700 competition quilts on display.
Next year the theme for the International Competitions for adults will be ?Transported? and for young Quilters it will be ?transport?: the dates for The Festival next year are 8th ? 11th of August.
This year they are presenting a gallery with Pauline Burbidge's work, inspired by The Holy Island of Lindisfarne, representing the series of large quilts she is working on for next year: it will tour the US going to The Quilt Museum in Nebraska.
My flight from Newark was delayed 6 hours, so instead of arriving at 7 am, we landed at 1:30 pm. I managed to walk most of the show at the end of the day, and tomorrow morning Bonnie McCaffery and I will film several galleries and interview several fiber artists.
I find it fascinating to track how the 3-D fiber-sculpture trend is growing exponentially here. I'll be sure to get photos so you can see what I am talking about. I love seeing the unique uses of color and texture, as I compare quilts from other international shows. European quilts express a very different aesthetic, compared to quilts in the Tokyo Quilt Festival, or the Melbourne Australia quilt show.
The big news here is that the show has been bought by another company, so next year it will be managed by a different group of people. I hope next year they will figure out how to put the quilters' names on all the quilts. Right now there is a number on a little card next to each quilt, and you have to look up the name in the show book to find out who is the quiltmaker. Very frustrating.
I only had a couple hours to walk the show today, but I found plenty of creatively unique quilts. I took lots of photos and will be sharing with you in the near future. Tomorrow I'll spend the whole day on the show floor, shooting video interviews and talking to quilt artists about their beautiful work.
I am glad that you are enjoying the show.
This is my 6th year visiting the Festival of Quilts, and I think that they don’t put the names on the quilts so that the judges don’t know who did the quilt, and it make the visitors buy a guide!
Oh, very luck you!! I lived in Worcestershire for 10 yrs. and we had a gardener who did his apprenticeship at Sudeley Castle. He was brilliant and Sudeley Castle is just gorgeous and quite often overlooked by most US tourists. Good on you for discovering it and all its beauty.
I was also at the Festival of Quilts, my first visit. I moved from the UK to Canada 9 years ago and started quilting once I got here. I have since become involved with the Ailsa Craig Community Quilt Festival in Ontario, a not for profit organization staffed entirely by volunteers, and each year we host a different country, last year it was the Netherlands and the quilt, “This many faces, this many cultures” was part of that show. This year we hosted Denmark and next year it will be Israel, with Israeli quilters and teachers coming. We were able to meet up with the President of the Israeli Quilting Association, Clara Kichel.
Maybe if you get time we might see you at our show?