Festival of Quilts 2019

The best part of the day - always - is the encounters with old friends. But there were things to see, too.

Works from the 40 years of the Quilters' Guild - these
(by Diana Harrison and Jo Budd) are from my formative years

 Eco dyeing was/is "big"....

India Flint's gallery

In  the "Natural Selection" gallery nearby - the 52 books
 made weekly by Alice Fox

Simplicity and complexity by Lotta Helleberg

"Did you see the pots?" people kept asking me. I did, and they made
me want to get back to stitching! By Fabienne Rey

Liz Hewitt's "Give Me Strength"

Mepuru by Caroline Bell

Inuit wallhanging from Sandra Meech's gallery

Sandra's Antarctic works on paper

From the bojagi gallery curated by Sara Cook, work by
Yoko Kubota 

"Silk Road" by Elizabeth Brimelow - strips of silk,
carefully tied at both ends ... a long thin piece

Another long thin piece (easy to store!) by Janet Twinn

 I went to the lecture by Michael James, but looked at his gallery first and was struck by the monochrome quilts. These were made during the time of his wife's final illness.

Detail showing how the quilting adds to the work

Recent, happier work - he explained how the fabrics were digitally
printed, based on photographs and drawings from India

Karina Thompson's gallery made a 3D labyrinth
out of her piece from the 2013 Saltaire exhibition

Leprous Hands is digitally embroidered

The Fine Art "Quilts" are usually contentious - and now it's become a "textiles" category! These are among those that appealled to me -

 Nearly missed the tiny gallery with five complicated quilts from the Japan quilt show. The detail of the work is astonishing -

Finally, my favourite piece(s), from the Pojagi exhibition, are these "collages"  by Marian Bijlenga - oil paint on used sandpaper -

Day out in Canterbury

Though the driver of the 10.07 was delayed on "a late running train", he eventually ran to the cab and we set off about 40 minutes late and went "fast to Faversham", arriving about 20 minutes later than scheduled. Most people had given up and taken other trains, so it was a quiet ride in an empty train through the sun-soaked countryside. 

Mags met me at the station and we walked the city walls, noting (in ground that has been empty [of buildings] since the 12th century) this enormous tree stump -

 and the fall of light on the old stones of the towers -

before reaching ye olde centre of town, with noticeably fewer tourists than in past weeks -

 and the angels on the cathedral gate as bored as ever -

 We lunched at the fabric emporium, which has a fabric-related decoration in its coffee shop -

and shared our on-the-go stitching - Mags is making quilty postcards from those scrappy edges you get when trimming a quilt -

Then to the main purpose of the day - I wanted to see my Suturing book, not to mention the rest of the Prescriptions exhibition (it's on till 24 Sept) -

A small, beige thing is my Suturing

Two of many "favourites" -

 Alas, I didn't photograph the descriptions of these - one is about tattoos, the other 
about anaesthesia (via the story of Sleeping Beauty) -

Cube magnets used front and back to hold the work on the (metal?) wall of the case -

 Elsewhere at The Beaney -

One of Elizabeth Frink's 19 etchings for Canterbury Tales, 1972

Light from the wonderful windows, photo by Mags
... I somehow missed seeing this, too much else to look at!