Festival of Quilts – Part 2 – The Gala Dinner
Well travelled up early to Birmingham International, with a hope to catch the free shuttle bus to the Birmingham Hilton Metropole. Whilst the website tells us that it runs every half hour, it doesn’t actually say *when* every half hour, so i could potentially turn up and have just missed it, so have to wait a half hour until it turned up again.
It turns out it’s on every hour and half hour, and I turned up just at the right time, and was the only passenger. Get to the hotel, and it’s crowded with people, mainly women (of course!), most 40 or older and what ever they were wearing virtually all of them were wearing very comfortable shoes. No crocs in sight, but there was a group of women wearing girly skirts and Jesus sandals which the horrible snob in me thought it was taking comfort just a little too far (sorry!).
Go to the bar, order a glass of wine – £7.95! £7.95 for one glass of a very average white wine! Look at their wine list and no bottles under £24 and certainly nothing spectacular – their markups must be ridiculous!.
It’s a long walk to the room where the dinner is held, and I get out of a potentially aqward situation, by being allocated to a table. I end up on a nearly full table and my nearest neighbours are very friendly, very well speaking Dutch, including a couple (she being the quilter, him over to Birmingham for a few days on a break in the UK for the first time). Give him a few tips of what to see in Birmingham on his “day off” today, and then get to talking to the woman on my left (Marijke Van Welzen) who was wearing one of her own designs.
The food was fine, nothing too exciting (likewise nothing bad) and suitable for feeding ~300 people all together in the space of just over an hour and a half.
After the coffee was served, there were the various awards for the quilts, for which the photos presented on screen gave only some indication of how good the quilts looked. I hadn’t seen the quilts “up close” and in real life, so when I saw the “Best in Show” on the screen, I did think “meh!”, but then I got the chance to see it after the show, and can certainly see why it got awarded the big prize – the detailing, that you can only see when up close – was/is amazing.
Sue Prichard, from the Victoria and Albert museum, gave the final after dinner speech (on her 21st wedding anniversary, bless!). Late next year, the V&A are holding an exhibition of quilts dating from 1700 – 2010. Some are specially commissioned for te exhibition, some are from the V&A’s own stocks and others have been leant from other museums around the country. Again, sitting at the back of the room, the photographs probably did no justice to any of the quilts or the work that went in to them, but they still looked excellent.
I caught the shuttle back to the train station, that thankfully still had trains running into town at 11:30 at night and collapsed into bed at just before midnight!
Tags: Exhibition, Festival of Quilts, Twisted Thread, V&A, Victoria And Albert Museum
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