Wow! What a wonderful time I had at the Australasian Quilt Convention in Melbourne last week. Sooooo many fun things and lovely people met and chatted to! Warning, this is a fairly long post…. grab a cuppa and sit down for a read 🙂
The delegates bag was full of some fab goodies from various sponsors and vendors…. Verandah popped in a handmade needle book, Punch and Judy had heaps of needle goodies, L’uccello slipped in a gorgeous thread minder, a pair of scissors from Fiskars and it just went on! And of course I totally forgot to take a pic of all the goodies! I was a bit like a kid on xmas morning opening present after present!
AQC is held in the Exhibition Building in Carlton…. a stunning building. The first day we were allowed in at 8:30am – an hour and a half before the general public and I managed to spend my entire allocated budget for the 3 days in that first hour!! DOH! (and yes, I am a fabricaholic). Hello Amy Sinibaldi’s Charleston!
I have been hanging out for L’uccello to create the pattern for their gorgeous Etui sewing boxes so I was first at their booth to buy my pattern! So looking forward to picking my fabric out and making it up 🙂
Then I headed off to my first of three classes – Emma Jean Jansen’s Gemstone Tumble. I thought it was about time I leaned how to foundation piece using freezer paper!
And yes, they gave us a pack each day for our morning and afternoon tea – that is the remnant of my blueberry muffin! I only had one range in my stash that had rainbow colours – Blueberry Park – I actually hadn’t realised that Emma had made her sample quilt out of the same fabric! So this is what my quilt will eventually look like! Serious DROOL!
And these are all the blocks we all made in the class – they would have made a pretty gorgeous quilt themselves!
To finish the first day there was a lecture from Angela Walters (of FMQ fame!) on how she got started in quilting. And I started day dreaming about how I can afford to get my hands on a long arm quilting machine!
Day two dawned (oh yes, very early!) with a breakfast with Angela and a close up with the Handi Quilter Simply Sixteen long arm. Very do-able and not quite in the range of sell-your-first-born (if I had one!).
My day two class was screen printing fabric with Saffron Craig… FUN!! So much so I only took one picture of my fabric when it was all finished!
I wanted to make something that would go with the various bits of Maze and Vale fabrics I have collected over the past few years… I have dreams of an improv patchwork quilt at some stage!
The lecture on Friday night was with Luke Haynes and it was fabulous! He looks at quilting in a very different way than I… from his fine arts and architecture backgrounds he has much more of an art perspective on things. And he has made some amazing quilts!
Day three and I was excited to be in Luke’s Log Cabin Condo class for the day! and I forgot to take a pic of him or the class! In my defence, I was flat out trying to get things finished before I had to leave 2 hours early to catch a flight to Adelaide to celebrate my dad’s 80th birthday.
As you can imagine, the class was fun, involved log cabins, and whilst I think what I have done so far looks a bit like a dog’s breakfast, once I have gotten to finish things as Luke suggested we should, I am sure it will look a WHOLE lot better!
And I did get to play with the latest most super cool Janome Horizon sewing machine 🙂 Boy, was @thefabrichusband lucky one of those didn’t come home in my hand luggage!!!
So to sum up, AQC 2017 was amazing. Exhausting, overwhelming and expensive but totally worth every cent! I am already saving for next year and hope there are some great classes again next year! One last pic of the amazing building.
The whole event sounds wonderful, and I am especially in awe of the beautiful building / setting!