Knitting and Stitching Show

Lookit! I went to the Knitting and Stitching Show today and made a thing!

It’s a weighted pincushion, see, with a little bag hanging off it to catch all the bits of thread and snippets of fabric that proliferate wherever sewing is done.

So neat! And I love the thimble fabric. (I got to choose from a pile of kits. Some of the fabrics were … well, not my style.)

I made it at a workshop with Terri McNeill (teacher, designer, and Creative Director of Irish Quilting Magazine), whom I know through the Irish Patchwork Society.

The pincushion was unstuffed when I brought it home, but I spent an industrious few minutes with some red lentils, a spoon, and my spice funnel, then sewed up the opening by hand. I also stuck in a double layer of polyester wadding (ugh), because I wasn’t really feeling the whole sticking-pins-into-a-pile-of-lentils thing.

Learning bit: Terri said, “Keep on stuffing the pincushion, and when you think there’s enough in there, add more.” She was right. I tamped down the lentils three or four times and kept stuffing, and I’m really pleased at how solid and fat the pincushion turned out.

Strategy

I’m a bit of a veteran at the Knitting and Stitching Show by this stage, I suppose. I knew exactly what I wanted to see and do when I arrived at 10:00 this morning.

I bought nothing (OK, one magazine), because I’m going back on Sunday. That’ll be shopping day.

Today was It’s an Exhibition Really day. Having signed up for my workshop, I ignored the retailers and focused entirely on the exhibitors.

(Honourable exception: This Is Knit, where I had a bit of a browse and an ogle and a fondle and a chat. Because you couldn’t not. Plus, I met my good friend Mollydot and the lovely She, who remembered me and the Oyster from last year!)

Highlights

Festival of Quilts 2010 overall winner, “Mission: Impossible 2″ by Kumiko Frydl. You may have seen images of this miniature quilt (I hadn’t; here’s a Google Images search), but standing in front of it – like, maybe three inches away, because it’s just that intricate – is a whole other matter. It’s breathtaking.

I really liked “Power of Ten”, an exhibition by Small Chat, an English contemporary art textiles group. I was particularly moved by Christina Brazier’s altered books, Helen O’Leary’s haunting representations of women’s clothing, and Ann Small’s dense, flowing, three-dimensional textile pieces.

Upstairs, I spent some time looking at “Tread Softly”, an exhibition of textiles by members of the Crafts Council of Ireland. I loved “Fragility” by Arlene Shawcross, “Divining” by Helen O’Shea, and “The Light of My Dreams” by Beth Moran.

Befuddled

I left the show about twelve hours ago.

During that time, I have done the following (highly uncharacteristic) things:

• left the pizza sauce bubbling on maximum heat for 45 minutes, believing I’d turned it down to minimum;
• gone supermarket shopping while leaving the car headlights on (despite the fact that the car has a built-in squeal designed to get my attention if I do this);
• dropped several things while I was packing up my supermarket shopping (non-disastrously, thank goodness);
• set bread to rise and utterly forgotten about it until I began to compile this list and hastily turned on the oven…

Do you think I might be a bit distracted? Processing, perhaps?

Every time I close my eyes, I see stitches.

I think I’ll ask Niall to drive me home on Sunday.