Fat Quarterly Retreat London 2013

27 Jul

This time last week I was in hot, sunny London having the time of my life at the Fat Quarterly Retreat.

I didn’t take a stack of photo’s as I was too busy chatting and sewing. However if you feel like you missed out then you can search on Instagram using #fqrlondon and you will find a few hundred photo’s to browse.

Here is the bag and contents that I received on arrival at retreat, full of great stuff from the sponsors, Abakhan, Moda, Korbond, Moda, Eternal Maker, Aurifil, Liberty, Riley Blake, Pat Bravo and Makower, thanks very much to the sponsors for this:

FQ Retreat London 2013 goody bag

There is also a fat eigth bundle of Type by Julia Rothman in the photo which I won in the paper piecing class that I took, more on this in another post.

On Friday night Delma from the Siblings Together charity came to retreat to receive some quilts on behalf of the charity, here I am handing over the two quilts I made:

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And this is the Siblings Together bee quilt from Lynne’s month (June):

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There are five of us in the photo who made a block each (and Lynne of course who put it all together). If you want to see more photo’s of other quilts that were handed over you can see them here.  There was a great pile at the end of the presentation, I think 31 quilts in total were handed over that evening.

Saturday night there was a ‘pub’ quiz on the terrace, I joined Marguerite, Penny, Krista and Hadley, Susan to form a winning team:

winners

(thanks Krista for photo)

As prizes we received some fantastic quilt patterns from Jen Kingwell, so after drooling over these for a while I might just get sewing.

There were swaps going on too, I’d opted out but organised a couple of private swaps, I’m now the proud owner of a thread catcher from Krista (see above), it’s been put to good use this week:

thread catcher

Then it was time to head downstairs to the main hall for market night, I was staying at my brothers for the weekend and had arranged to have dinner with him so fortunately (for my bank a/c) I didn’t have long to shop.  What I did do was collect a pile of fabric from Annie at the Village Haberdashery which I had purchased a couple of weeks before when she had a crazy 50% off sale fabrics making most of it £1 per FQ!!

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I took some classes too, some of which I’ll show later when I’ve found the items and photographed them!  With Tacha on Sunday morning I made a flexi frame pouch, my cutting was wrong but at first glance not too obvious and I finished the pouch so I’m not complaining.  I even bought some frames to make some more at home!

flexi frame
(Photographed on the mini design board I swapped with by Elita)

I sneaked in to Kerry’s Fantasy Fabric shop class as there was room at her table, it was really useful and made me feel better about those times I stand in front of my stash wondering what fabrics to put together – it’s not easy and there is an art to it.  Kerry challenged us to put some bundles together and this was mine:

fantasy fabric

In summary (I could go on but I’m in the middle of jam making) it was a wonderful weekend, great to catch up with people I met last year, meeting new people and meeting for the first time people I’ve met online.  If you want to read more (some people have written numerous posts about the weekend!) there are a lists of blog post at the Fat Quarterly blog.

Thanks very much for everyone involved for putting on a great event – looking forward to next year!

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6 Replies to “Fat Quarterly Retreat London 2013

  1. It was lovely to meet you – even if it was briefly to deal fabric 😉 I’ve finished my vintage sheet quilt top and as soon as the wadding arrives I can get it finished!

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