What a weekend!

Well, I am back after a fabulous and exhausting weekend in Brisbane for the Textile show. I have managed to load these pictures completely back to front butit doesn't really matter, they are all of some of the wonderful stuff we saw.
While I have never been a quilter and have no aspirations to start now, I can really admire the work which has gone into the quilts we saw there. I loved the delicate colours of this one by Julie Haddrick of South Australia.



This quirky pole of knitted jumpers and heads is advertising an event to be held in a town west of Brisbane in July - they just appealed to my sense of humour.

As part of the show there was a competition for textile art from recycled objects. I messed up the photo I took of the winning entry and had by that time deleted the image from my camera so I can't show it to you - I have now learnt a new lesson - don't delete photos till you have completely finished editing! The winning entry was clever, but to me was simply something saying it had been made from recycled stuff. Whereas these..........................

I really hope these photos will enlarge for you, the one above is made by Linelle Steptoe of New South Wales and is of a waratah and banksia flower - all made from cured cane toad skin!! It is just gorgeous. The cane toad was introduced into Australia about 76 years ago and is now an appallngly destructive pest, so I am glad something useful can be made from it.

I am afraid I can't tell you who made this lovely piece of art, which happens to be made from recycled materials. I liked it the best of the whole section, but of course it didn't win! A lot of the entries were very clever, but gimmicky, while this one to me is something I would be very happy to have hanging on my wall.

There was a huge rush on Friday morning to get from the airport over to the Convention Centre as my sister Barb and I were booked to do a workshop with Carol Wilkes for the day - collaged cloth. What fun we all had, Carol is so easy to listen to, she has so many ideas and nothing was too much trouble. This is something she had made and had there to demonstrate some of her work to us. The class was large and we were all using computerised Pfaff machines supplied and set up by the sponsor - oh boy, was that a challenge! Thank goodness there were a couple of dealers helping out and going round sorting out everyone's problems. We were laying strips on a piece of fabric, then making cords and doodads to decorate and finish the piece - of course they all ended up as WIPs. I will try to take a photo of my WIP and blog about that tomorrow.

This photo was supposed to be at the top of the list, as this is Dale at the Thread Studio stand, and I only found out about the Textile show through reading Dale's blog and website. We did a short workshop with Dale which was heaps of fun. Thank goodness, when we went to buy our goodies the stall was far less crowded than when I took this picture. Poor Dale and Ian were having trouble setting up their stall on the Thursday and wondering why nothing fitted properly when they realised the tables were nearly half a metre shorter than the ones in Melbourne!! Anyway we all found the goodies we wanted - and a few more - so came away happy.

Barb and I also did short workshops using shiva sticks and another on Angelina and Crystalina fibres. That one was for scrapbooking, which I can't be bothered with, but I still learnt some new techniques. Now I need to get around to applying them!

There were huge crowds at the show on the Friday, but thank goodness much quieter on Saturday so we could wander around from stall to stall to have a good look at what was on offer - heaps of things which I had never seen or heard of before, so good to touch and feel rather than just look at photos on the websites. Found some really cute tiny little scissors which the stallholders say you can get through security and take on planes - but I don't think I shall try it out, I will be the exception that proves the rule for sure.

I need to go and do some work. I have some more photos to post, particularly of some really stunning quilts - wall hangings - not sure which you would call them, but they just took my breath away.