Awards Dinner, London

As mentioned earlier my very talented former student Jayne Mulqueen was awarded a City & Guilds Medal For Excellence last month in Leeds, so I was lucky enough to be invited to the main celebration for all 90 medal winners this year at Lancaster Gate Hotel, London. Which also meant a great opportunity to pay a visit to my favourite museum the Victoria and Albert. The latest exhibition there is the British Quilts retrospective, so I was there with the crowds promptly waiting for the doors to open at 10.00am. A wise move as I got straight into the exhibition and it wasn't too busy that came half an hour later!!
As an overview it really made me want to stitch, inspired me to look at flat textiles as opposed to the hats which I haven't felt for a while, and as always with quilts I am in awe of the technical dexterity and patience in creating a patchwork form, all that paper pattern making, stitching fabric around the shapes and then piecing them all, one can see how it was a craft for the genteel lady.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/textiles/quilts-1700-2010/videos/index.html

There was a lot in the exhibition that I found inspiring from the tailors' and soldiers' quilts to the prisoners co-operative quilt, I was even surprised pleasantly by the Tracey Emin piece. The ones that were really exciting were the contemporary work, I really liked the audio visual pieces especially the needles reducing to one left in the hand. The text quilt was also a stand out for me and the Applecross piece, shockingly I haven't remembered the names of the artists so need to do some research on that asap! Well worth the investment of time and money.

Then I went next door well after a welcome respite in the beautiful tea rooms! To the Strawberry Hill exhibition, based on Horace Walpole's house in London and how he is deemed to be the first curator of relevance and put forward many ideas that are used in curating now. 

After cultural saturation I did indulge in  some retail therapy, then off to dinner, I did like the new hat created rapidly on Saturday night with a feather from Lotherton Bird Garden and the new Kansashi flowers.