Auckland's Festival of Quilts

Recently the Auckland Quilt Guild hosted their annual show, The Festival Of Quilts.This is a show I look forward to every year; I think it's our biggest New Zealand quilt show. I'm a little slow to blog about this - I'm not sure where the time has flown to in the last week!

Before I could enjoy the quilts though there was a lot of work to be done.
The shop I work at, The Country Yard, had a booth there again this year...the last few (or more) weeks have been really busy as we made samples, packed kits, and tried to get ready for the show.
After an afternoon spent setting up - with quilts up, quilts down, quilts moved sideways then back again, cushion up, cushion down, cushion sideways and back again, we were finally set up and were really happy with how our booth looked.

We had a good view of some of the quilts from our booth —

And also the challenge quilts —

Here is the stadium from above —

I worked in the booth on Friday and a little of Saturday; then it was time for me to be a spectator...

There was a wide variety of quilts; this was the Best Of Show —

No Entry by Norma Slabbert

This quilt had a mixture of hand quilting and machine quilting.

Typical me though, went for some thing a little more traditional for my favourite —

Red Radiant by Colleen Burr

Amazing piping finshed it off beautifully.

As usual for me my photos mostly consist of a bit of quilting, a block design, or a colour combination. Here is a very small sampling of some of the quilts that were there —

My Favourite Fabrics by Ruth Reynolds

Love Entwined by Jennry Henry

Flower Power by Chris Behersing

Catch Me If You Can by Betty McLean

Southern Stars by Mary Hawke
Amazing teeny tiny stars!

Aim for the Moon by Marie Harrison

Buona Notte by Sue Flego

Of course there were a plenty more quilts shown and there have been a good variety of photos on some other local blogs;  visit Julie, Wendy, Ali, Leeann if you want to see more. 

Lately I've been showing sneak peeks of an applique project I've been working on....I had enough of it completed to be able to share on our booth. Evandale is a BOM I am making the sample for, for next year. I think it's going to be lovely!

Another weekend has been and gone... I finally had a chance to turn my machine on and do a little secret Christmas sewing...then got back into my Mod Bear Paw's box and did some sorting... I have pieces cut and ready to sew. I'm still behind but making slow progress :-)

At the moment I am on a quick trip 'down the line' to visit some family...among other things, I have delivered the baby gifts I finished in my last post, as well as these two little beanies YD knitted for her new second cousin...yes, she is having a short break from dog jerseys - aren't these cute?

These are both Ravelry patterns she found.

We awoke this morning to hear the distressing news that there had been earthquakes further south, and nasty ones at that. Where we live in the north we are well out of the shaking zone but I did appreciate emails from bloggy friends 'just checking'. As with us all, my heart goes out to everyone who's been affected by the quakes...there's a lot of rebuilding of lives to do.