Festival of Quilts

There is nothing more inspiring than an enormous room full of crafty paraphernalia that's packed to the rafters with people who share your hobby in abundance and are every bit as excited about it as you are...

I'm talking of course, about the Festival of Quilts. It's a heavenly day of stash enhancement (shopping), discovery of new techniques and meeting a multitude of like-minded souls.

I'll be writing more about some of the amazing quilts I saw, and that will hopefully spur me on to create some of my own, but for now, I thought I'd share with you the day's haul.

Oh Festival of Quilts, you make me so happy

Above you can see:

• The Hana bag kit and some delicious kimono fabric fat quarters from Japan Crafts. Their fabrics are so wonderfully unusual.
• Three sets of craft-specific needles from Redditch's own John James Needles - long and short beading needles, bent-ended needles (probably not the technical term) for sewing-up knitting and some patchwork needles. Perfect for my three current crafts!
• Some yummy motif cottons from Doughty's. From the sublime to the slightly ridiculous: a William Morris print, nautical shapes and cute elephants. Definitely check out Doughty's if you're in the west of England/east Wales - they have several shops in Hereford.
• A patchwork ruler from Creative Grids - I really don't have an excuse for not starting that log cabin blanket now!
• And finally, a beautiful metre of peacock feather ribbon from a French company called Tendance Ruben. New to the show this year, they have some stunning designs from the likes of Kaffe Fassett and Amy Butler. We were utterly spoilt for choice and could easily have bought hundreds of metres worth of exquisite ribbon.

There was also something fabulous from my local Spellbound Beads but I can't tell you about that just yet - it's supposed to be a surprise...

The Festival of Quilts runs until Sunday 11th August at Birmingham's NEC. It features a hall full of stalls as well several superb exhibitions from quilters around the world. Standard tickets on the door are £15.