Henley-on-Thames Craft and Design Experience Fair seems like such a long time ago, but it was only last weekend that I was there with my Machine Embroideries under canvas in a well laid out marquee chatting and selling to clients textile enthusiast and friends. The only down side to the whole exhibition that is was so cold! not only in the day but at night too, camping is usually a wonderful outdoors celebration of mother nature and all her bounty's but not last week, I was too cold to notice the delights of nature, I'm ashamed to admit I longed for brick walls and central heating.

I have been and visited the Quilt exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum "Quilts 1700-2010" The exhibition was fantastic and I thoroughly enjoyed all of the quilts.
Each quilt possessed its own beauty, whether through the construction and choice or fabric (or the fabric available to the maker at the time of making) or the quilts happy or tragically sad story behind it (if know). Most quilts at the exhibition were made by women.
One quilt in particular made me cry. It was still unfinished as the girl guides who were making it had been found out, it was made by internees of a Japanese prisoner of war camp in the second world war, they were making it for their girl guide leader. In the middle of some of the patchwork florets they had embroidered their names. I thought about those young girls, cutting up their own clothes to make a decorative and useful gift for their guide leader, all working in secret and the thought of this act of kindness and the making of something so beautiful and with so much love in a place of such horror and deprivation and the tears just streamed down my face as I gazed at their quilt.