Craft and Quilt Fair Chaos

The last week has been one of the most exhausting and fulfilling weeks I've had for a long time. Earlier this year, the Tasmanian MQG was offered a booth at our Craft and Quilt Fair (which runs alongside our state quilt show, Island Quilts) - a chance we jumped at. We devised a Prism mini quilt challenge for our members to be displayed in our booth, thinking this would fill our booth space nicely. But! The booth we were offered gradually increased in size - and we found out with just a week to go that we had a huge 12m x 3m space to fill (double what we were originally offered!!). Panic ensued with the realisation that we would need a LOT more than our Prism quilts to fill the space - but thanks to some very creative thinking by one of our amazing members (Briony, left in the photo below) a plan was hatched to fill our booth with interesting, interactive and stimulating ideas to promote modern quilting in Tasmania. I am so proud of what we achieved, our booth looked amazing!! These three ladies (three of my best quilty friends) and myself were responsible for most of the panic sewing and organising involved in putting our booth together. Lots of our committee members helped set up and man the booth at the fair as well, so it was a real team effort.

Our raffle quilt was hanging at one end of the booth - the winner was drawn on Sunday and was absolutely thrilled (understandably, I was secretly hoping I'd win it!!)

Our Prism Challenge quilts created a rainbow of colour across half the booth and attracted a lot of positive feedback. It looked spectacular! 

The other end of the booth was divided into Rest (where we had colouring pages and seats available), and Play (where we had a design wall with lots of orphan blocks and HSTs for people to play with).

 I didn't manage to get a good photo in situ, but our TMQG banner debuted in our booth as well. Our logo was designed by Briony when we started the guild last September, and then one of our talented members, Belle (@ausbelle on Instagram) appliqued and stitched it into a fabric version. I panic-quilted it over a couple of days last week and hurriedly took a few (dodgy) photos before packing it up for the booth. It was terrifying to quilt Belle's beautiful work - but I think the simple FMQ straight lines with some ghost triangles (echoing those in our logo) works quite well.

Aside from the excitement of spreading the word of modern quilting in Tassie, it has been a phenomenal weekend in terms of meeting and talking to some seriously amazing women. On Friday night, I did my first trunk show at a Bernina event and it was a great experience. I was (more than) slightly terrified, but it went really well and the feedback I got was fantastic. It just goes to show that even if you're terrified inside, you can come across as a confident speaker (even if you forget half of what you wanted to say ;o) ). I spent most of Saturday and Sunday talking quilts with some incredibly inspiration women, and I'm still digesting most of it but I might be back with some of my thoughts at a later stage.

I hope you all had a great weekend, and I'll hopefully be back later this week with some quilty progress!

xx Jess