11 April 2024
Sarah Hibbert needs little introduction to many as her famous Macaroons quilt graced the cover of the Festival of Quilts show catalogue and poster in 2020 and 2021. Her fabulous (mostly linen based) colourful quilts have won prizes and two of them have been bought by the International Quilt Museum in Nebraska. This year at Festival of Quilts she has another gallery alongside Jaeyoung Eom from South Korea.
She recently had a book published, From Collage to Quilt, which features many of her works as well as instructions and quirky photography. There is even a recipe for chocolate brownies, which we found out was very delicious as one of our members, Yvonne, made some for us to eat at Sarah’s workshop!
Sarah is a very engaging and entertaining speaker. She brought many quilts for us to see and touch and had equally many stories (including chasing down Rod Stewart to get him to sign a photo of him in her book (she succeeded!)). She adds a few red stitches to every quilt as her signature. Her work is beautiful and those of us booked onto her workshop later in April eagerly anticipate it.
In the afternoon, we divided up into three groups and Annie Henderson-Begg and Buffy Fieldhouse led us in a slow stitching workshop. This was based on some of the more unusual stitches available on the Royal School of Needlework’s Stitchbank (rsnstitchbank.org). This is a free resource with videos, explanations of how to stitch for everyone, both left and right-handed, history and detailed photos of over 100 stitches. More are added each quarter, so it is worth regularly checking out. Stitches can be searched for by their structure, or use, or technique. You can even have your own favourite stitches saved in the ‘My Stitches’ section.
It was fun trying new stitches, although the Shisha mirrors was a bit harder than the other stitches chosen!
Links
Instagram @quiltscornerstone