Here’s the third (and final) part of my blog mini-series, Reflections on Festival of Quilts 2026.  You can find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

Today, Friday 31st July, I was attending Festival of Quilts 2026 “For Fun” – I had no role to play, other than visitor; and I wasn’t focused on my Judging course!  It was purely pleasure!

I started my day with a lie in, having had to be at the NEC by 7.45am on both Wednesday and Thursday.  The delightful server in the hotel even commented that I was late down for breakfast!  Of course, the knock-on effect from that lie in was that I had to park a bit further away from the halls.  Ah well!

I really recommend that you splash out and get a show guide as the information contained within this 2-part publication is incredibly useful.  Not only do you get the artist statements for every quilt that has been entered into the competition, you also get an introduction to each of the galleries, a listing of all of the retailers and of course, the map.  I did see this year that there is an app, but I didn’t access that.

Over breakfast I spent some time looking through all the exhibitors, retailers and galleries to make sure that I knew where things were, and marked them on the map so that I wouldn’t miss anything.  Part way through the morning I settled down for a cup of tea and revisited my map to update where I needed to visit, where I had been and any extra thoughts.  While I was doing that I met up with a trio visiting Festival of Quilts 2026 for (I think) the first time.  I made a dreadful assumption that the lady was the quilter and that she had brought two men with her.  It turned out that it was the two men who were the quilters and that the lady was in the supporting role!  I was ashamed of myself for such a gendered assumption.  I should do and know better.

They forgave me for my faux pas, and I then went on to make another assumption!  I assumed that they already knew of the gallery this year about men in quilting – they didn’t.  Their visit was all coincidental! 

We looked at my show guide and I showed them where there were lots of male quilters represented, and their next job was to go and get their own show guide.  They had presumed that it would not really be useful so hadn’t bothered to buy one when they arrived. 

We also found that one of the men had links to Watford, having attended the Building Research Establishment in his younger days, had attended Sidmouth Folk Festival (where I am heading tomorrow) with his Elizabethan music ensemble, and was a woodwind player.  He played totally from music but (when I played bass clarinet) I played totally by ear.  So many points of contact from such a serendipitous meeting.

The rest of my day was spent catching up with people, and buying a copy of Leah Higgins’ new, updated book on breakdown printing, hot off the press, as it only arrived from the printers a short while before Leah had to pack for Festival of Quilts 2026.  You may recall I did a workshop with Leah a couple of months ago and you can read about that here

I took a few more photographs of quilts, but I didn’t manage to see anywhere near all 800+ of the competition quilts!  Is this a record-breaking number of entries for Festival of Quilts? 

I did have a lovely conversation with a friend about the winner of the Traditional category. 

How could it be a winner when it wasn’t traditional – it had taken traditional patterns and skills and taken them further with techniques that might be more comfortable within contemporary or art classifications? 

Well, the answer to that is to look in the rules of the competition and in that category specifically – so we did!  Make sure that you check the rules for that year specifically, don’t depend on previous years’ information. 

There is nothing in the rules for Festival of Quilts 2026 that says you can’t push the boundaries (thank goodness!)  It is very important to put aside your own preconceptions regarding quilt categories, and instead rely on the information given within any competition’s rules.  And in this instance, everything was fulfilled quite beautifully.  One of the stewards said that Water-soluble fabric was used to create all the beautiful holes in the quilt.

Beauty in the Broken by Kathy K Wylie

Beauty in the Broken by Kathy K Wylie – detail

I also stopped by Henley’s Sweets and treated myself to some chocolate ginger and chocolate honeycomb, to take down to Sidmouth when I go tomorrow.  Readers – both packs had disappeared before teatime!  But it did mean I didn’t have to have a meal!

Well, that’s it for my visit to Festival of Quilts 2026.  I am off to Sidmouth for a holiday in the morning, so will catch up with you all when I get home.  Thanks for joining me for this very rushed visit!