This year was the first time in 6 years(!) that I was neither pregnant, nor had a small baby with me at the festival of quilts. It was strangely liberating. 🙂

After all this time, Jaq and I have our trip down to a fine art. We arrive as the show is starting on the saturday, we don’t buy a programme so we have no idea where anything is, we go up and down the aisles, and take photos of the booth numbers when we find a place we want to go back to, we ignore the quilts completely (sorry!), and when we arrive at The Eternal Maker‘s booth, we spend a bit of money, and then stop for lunch. (In the last couple of years we have learned to take a packed lunch with us. This saves time, and money.)

Then we carry on where we left off, looking at the rest of the booths, then we go back and hit all the places we want to go back to, including dropping more money at The Eternal Maker. If we need anything from Doughty‘s then we do that last. At about 3.30pm we look at each other and say ‘are we done?’ and then we go home. We get home before W and the children come back from whatever they are doing, have a drink and a snack and a sit down and go through all the things we have bought.

This year (probably due to it being just the two of us, as I said), felt really relaxed. The walk ways between rows of booths felt wider, and though it was busy it didn’t feel squished. We both bought great stuff – I got some great pompom kits for the children (which I’ll do a post on after I give them to them), and Jaq got a brilliant ruler and foot set for quilting.

As for the fabric – the yellow flowered piece is going to be a curtain for the back room, there are camera and Charlie Harper trousers for FB, a toucan dress in the pipeline of LR, and a snail top for HB. Plus honey bee’s and princess’s and peas, and grey and yellow linen that will be made into good things over the next year.

It’s always so exciting to go to the festival for me. I feel like a buyer for my own tiny home label – it really is a good 80-90% of the fabric I’ll be using for the year, it’s the trousers and shorts and dresses that my children will be wearing in the next year or so, and most of it is picked in a frantic 20 minutes in The Eternal Maker booth. I love it! And I can’t wait to do it next year!

(Note for readers – I’m not affiliated with any of the companies I’ve mentioned. I don’t make any money off them. I just really like them. )