2009 Quilt Symposium

Easter weekend is the time for this year's national quilt symposium.

The symposium is held every 2 years, and is attended by over 1000 quilters from around New Zealand and the world. Classes are run by national and international tutors. There are several exhibitions of quilts and fibre art by general entrants and tutors. A huge merchants mall is stuffed with everyone selling everything to do with quilting and fibre art. There are lectures and dinners too I suppose. There was an awards ceremony.

There are several challenges by specific sponsors, where you have to make a quilt or artwork on a given theme or using particular general instructions. One example is the postage stamp quilts. This is sponsored by NZ Post, and the rules seem to be that you can choose any postage stamp you like and make a 50cm square quilt inspired by that stamp. A really interesting collection of quilts resulted - people had taken 'inspired by' in a number of different lights, which was all good.

I pre-registered Sophie so she would get all the information, but we did not end up doing any classes - too expensive for her really, and I daren't start anything new until I've finished her teenage quilt. Instead of a class I've promised her $50 worth of fabric or supplies and she can run her own 'class' out of a book during the holidays. I think she is gong to get some fabric dyes, or something like that.

We went along on Saturday as volunteers, packing the morning teas and lunches for the 1000 people at classes on the day. (Actually I don't know how many people, but when we'd sorted all the bread trays of filled rolls into the boxes for the classes we were 150 short on the number required - the caterer had left them behind at their premises!)

We also checked out the merchants mall, but haven't bought any souvineers yet.

On Monday we did the exhibitions. It's worth while making a day of this as there are several and your $5 ticket to one gets you into all of them, for that day. I partiularly enjoyed the challenge quilts, but there was no information about what the challenge was displayed alongside them - we worked it out, and then looked them up on the website.

We might do some shopping today so Sophie can start her 'class'. And, yes, I was inspired and sat down on Sunday afternoon and did a couple of hours work on Sophie's teenage quilt!