Sewing for Pleasure/ Fashion, Embroidery and Stitch

Friday and Saturday I was in Birmingham at the above show held at the NEC. Friday I mostly went round with my fashion teacher/designer head on. Sat I helped Hilary Gooding look after the Contemporary Quilt stand, where we engaged the visitors who stopped to look at the Journal Quilts from 2009. I think it was quite successful as we convinced quite a few people to begin to try new things, possibly in a scheduled way like the monthly journals. And that it wasn't so scary to do a small piece because you were only committing to a small amount of time and materials.

Here are some of the interesting bits of the time at the show...or at least some I thought to photograph.

The Fashion Show was fascinating. Not just Inkberrow Design Centre, but other colleges as well. These pieces were from the student collection from one of the colleges. The theme was Make Do and Mend, the inspiration being WWII fashion. I loved it. The same theme was the inspiration for one of my C+G pieces. The garments in the first photo were made from fabrics that had WWII images printed onto them.

Costumes from the film The Duchess.

Katie Patchett - one of the Madeira Sponsored Students

I love the way she displayed her printed and manipulated textiles!

And then from the sublime to the ridiculous...

As I was going from the hotel to the show on Saturday morning, I ran into a whole platoon"?" of Stormtroopers,

Visitors to the Sewing shows were a bit taken aback when they came down the escalators! ...and then whipped out the cameras!

Darth Vadar,

 Tuscan Raiders,

 and even 2 R2 D2's (remote control).

It was a Memorabilia show in a different hall.

As well as several other Star Wars characters, I also saw a Monkey from the Planet of the Apes, and several troops in combat gear with submachine guns, perhaps from that film, as they were talking together, but I saw it so long ago, I only remember the monkeys.

Needless to say, it was a bit surreal!