The festival was held at Kearsney College, a private boys high school in Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN). What a beautiful setting - crisp cool mornings warming up to warm sunny days typical of the KZN winter. There were loads of vendors, almost "over countable" as my children would say. Amafu, Dana Biddle, Bernina, Pfaff, Brother, Arthur Bales and Wool n Weave are some of the vendors that exhibited their wares at the festival. All the stalls were bright and sunny. There were so many different colours. Almost everyone was selling bright happy fabrics, threads and yarns.
On a slightly different note, another hat I wear is that of co-owner and mad scientist of my own fabric hand-dyeing business. The company is called "TwigaDudu" and we use very different base fabric to most of the other commercial hand-dyers. We use loom state fabric and it's slightly rougher and earthier than most base fabric. The advantage is that it seems to absorb more dye than other fabrics so our colours tend to be more intense than what is currently available on the market. The point of this shameless "plug" is that we were too small to exhibit our fabric at this year's festival, but we will definitely be at the next one. In the meantime, why don't you pop over to our site and browse around.
Back to the Festival, on the Saturday morning I did half a fabric dyeing course by Helga Beaumont, attended the Kaffe Fasset lecture on the Saturday afternoon and walked round the quilt exhibition on the Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately the photo below is the only photo I have with the quilt makers name. There was just too much going on to write it all down or even to remember to photograph the descriptions next to each photo. Next time......
This photo is of an award winning quilt by my very good friend Susan Wessels. It's stunning. I love the colours and the balance.
There was also one quilt that was attributed to Dena Crain's Quilt University "Darned Quilts" class. As many of you know that Online University in it's original format has closed because of the sad passing of the dean of the university, Carol Miller. Dena Crain has started her own online quilting faculty - QuiltEdOnline. I would encourage anyone looking for online courses that are clear, concise and loaded with information, to visit her website and try out one of her offerings.
In the meantime, I will continue to look through my photos, and maybe, who knows, I will find some descriptions of the quilts in the photographs.
