On Thursday, August 6th, Stuart Hillard from The Great British Sewing Bee opened the Game of Quilts 2015 event at Festival of Quilts.  Pictured here with Hilary Gooding and Betty Croke when the machine was threaded and ready to start work!

We had an amazing time at Festival of Quilts on the Game of Quilts stand.  On Thursday and Friday, after a huge welcome and introduction from our lovely Stuart Hillard,  our teams of gallant quilters set to and cut, pressed, stitched and quilted till they had a finished quilt at the end of the day.  We were in awe of the amount of preparation and thought that had gone into the project by everyone concerned.

One quilt was done using the Quilt-As-You-Go technique

All Layered Up present the finished quilt.

and the others were pieced before the wadding and backing was added.

Making sure that each piece of the quilt was in the right place before sewing!

Some hand quilting went on as well as machine quilting.

Bindings and labels were added as the clock ticked to the close of the show and shouts of joy could be heard as each quilt in turn was hung on the wall at the back of the stand.

We had lots of visitors taking time to ask questions, watch the quilts progress, return to see how much more had been done and leave their names for us to contact them next year.  As well as our British guests, we had enquiries from Holland, Norway, Australia and Denmark.  Several people said they had a team in mind for 2016 as well.  The Quilters’ Guild of the British Isles has offered to supply a team from some of its trustees!

Visitors’ Choice was very close with all four quilts in the competition gaining lots of votes.  There were only a few votes separating first and second.  The winners were team number 4 – Why Not Quilters – whose team members were

Linda Forey

Jenny Anderson

Jenny Collard

Faith Rogatzki

Why Not Quilters with the winning entry for Game of Quilts!

Those lucky ladies will now be looking forward to a day with Hilary Gooding and me in the Bernina Studio in London where they will go home with a lovely quilted and embroidered item.  They will have a chance to see the latest Bernina software with its endless possibilities as well.

News of the event is spreading around the world as well as we had visitors from every part of the globe.  June Enerstad,  Bernina importer from Scandinavie, made a video which has gone on Youtube for the world to see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1wjOlyN2A

Our spot is about 5 minutes into the video.  June has promised to try to get a team together from her country, Denmark, for next year!  We look forward to seeing her again in 2016.

Saturday and Sunday saw the organising team making quilts as well

Hilary working on Saturday’s quilt.

and by the end of the show, we had a total of 9 quilts ready to present to Project Linus who will take them to The Birmingham Children’s Hospital for us and make some sick children very happy with a snuggle quilt!

Nine quilts were given to Project Linus’ President Lyn Antill on the last day of the show.

A huge vote of  thanks goes to all at Bernina UK for their sponsorship of this event, their support at the show and the prize for the Visitors’ Choice.  Our teams had wonderful machines to work on and several ladies went to the main Bernina stand to see the fantastic range on view there.

Jan Allston                                                                                       August 2015