Sandown and a New Toy

On Saturday I went on a coach trip organised by Margaret to take quilters from Wimborne, Poole and Ringwood to the National Quilt Championships at Sandown Racecourse, in Esher.  It was a very enjoyable trip and the chance to catch up with an old friend Sue, who I hadn't seen for ages.

I was disappointed that there weren't many competitive quilts, but there were really good collections of display quilts from Sandie Lush's "knitted" quilts (which you can see here on her site here from the Festival of Quilts gallery) to Rosalind Pollocks delightful collection of quilts under the title "Does it need beads"(her blog is here).  Because the photos are for personal use I am not allowed to show any here, but what I can show is one of my purchases.

I saw a lovely quilt of skirts and tops decorated with all sorts of embellishments on Antique Angels stand and asked for the kit.  They didn't have any kits left so bought the two panels to make up a quilt. I was so surprised that they were printed panels as the quilt looked so convincingly like an appliqued one, look below at the pic and you'll what I mean. They are very pretty and very girly I just could not resist.

I also did a quick workshop in the afternoon with Lynette Harris of the Stitch Witch.  She cannot be mistaken at quilt shows with her trademark witches hat and blue wig!  One of the popular items that she sells is fusible bias binding and she showed a way that one can design a simple Celtic knot and use the iron to follow the pattern made to fuse the binding to fabric.  Here's my (still unfinished!) sample here.

I was quite pleased with this and I should be even more please when I get it done! It was a relaxing break after the hard graft of looking at quilts and looking at the trade stalls!

Now for the new toy - I got a new phone, get bang up to date with one of those new fangled smartphones, replacing my dependable old Sony Ericsson on that I've had for the past 5 years and just thought it time for a change.

Hmm, doesn't look much does it.  Another photo that I had wasn't that good either.  I can get e-mails, texts and I've had my phone list transferred, but there are some bits (a lot of bits really) I've yet to discover it can do.  I've tried to sync it to my computer to download some music, but both phone and computer are trying their best to ignore each other.  Think it'll need more playing about with.