Festival of Quilts: The quilts, the colour, and the makers who made our day

We're writing this from England, fresh off a day wandering the halls of the Festival of Quilts - and it's fair to say the highlight of the day was standing in front of Luke Haynes' work in person.

Photos never quite do justice to scale, and that was the first thing that struck us. One of his pieces, a three-panel work of genuinely epic proportions, was so large it had to be hung horizontally across the wall, even though it read as though it wanted to be vertical. There's something about standing in front of a quilt that size that a screen simply can't translate. You feel the scale in your body before you've even taken in the detail.

Among the new work on display, Big Me held the wall, Luke's signature move of turning the self-portrait into something monumental. Alongside it was a newer piece from what he described as his ongoing bed series - the self-portraits he makes each year and then genuinely sleeps under. It's a detail that sounds almost like a joke until you're standing in front of the work and realise how much nerve and self-awareness it actually takes.

But for us, the real highlight was Magnolia. It's a self-portrait of Luke sniffing a magnolia, a flower he told us he planted himself, in his own garden. There's something quietly moving about that: the plant, the portrait, and the maker, all connected in one small, tender gesture. It's the kind of piece that doesn't announce itself the way the bigger works do, but stays with you longer.

And then there was Luke himself. Jo Sheather sat down with him for a short interview, and meeting him in person only confirmed what we'd hoped - he's warm, genuine, and generous with his time and his stories. It was a real pleasure to spend that time in his company.

Ang, Luke Haynes, Nicole Leth and Jo at Festival of Quilts.

Colour, up close: Catherine-Marie Longtin

We also got to spend time with the work of Catherine-Marie Longtin, who works almost exclusively in the log cabin technique, and what struck us most was her use of colour. It looks so simple at first glance, and then the longer you stand with it, the more complex and considered it reveals itself to be.

She told us she doesn't always have the patience for quilting itself, but what keeps her coming back is the variety of it - the endless play of colour and pattern within a single, quite traditional structure. That love of colour, she said, traces back to her grandfather, who spent his career mixing paint colours for plastics at a large company. A lovely, unexpected thread, from industrial colour-matching to some of the most intuitive colour work we saw all day.

Catherine-Marie has just released her book, Log Cabin Quilt Blocks: 100 Colour and Pattern Variations, with Batsford. If you want more on her practice and the philosophy behind her making, keep an eye out for the upcoming Friday Feature Artist episode with our own Jo Wright.

One piece that stayed with us was Portrait, Woman in Green, inspired by nineteenth-century chiaroscuro portraiture. It renders the ghostly presence of a red-haired woman in a green dress, somewhere between a John Singer Sargent painting and a pixelated, Paul Klee-like abstraction. She worked it in linen, cotton, a linen-wool blend, cotton wadding and cotton embroidery thread. Much of her work isn't for sale, she makes it, she told us, not for accolades or awards, but for the sheer joy the process gives her.

The people behind the quilts

As always, our favourite part of any fibre art exhibition is the people - whether that's a professional artist showing decades of work, or someone who's entered a quilt for the very first time. We met so many talented, generous makers today, all of them putting themselves and their work out there, and we want to say a genuine thank you to everyone who came up to say hello, who recognised us from our YouTube videos or our courses, and who shared such kind words. It's one thing to be on this side of the computer - it's another thing entirely to stand in front of someone's work in person and see the pride they carry in it. Thank you to everyone who stopped for a chat or a photo, and to those who let us grab a few impromptu words on camera. We feel genuinely grateful, every day, to be even a small part of this community.

Brad Whale

One of the people we're most grateful to have met was Brad Whale. Brad has been diagnosed with motor neurone disease, and he's found quilting to be a way of processing what he's living through and moving forward with his life on his own terms. The piece we spoke to him about was called Reflection: From Within, On My Own Terms. Brad also runs a YouTube channel where he documents his making journey, and the scale of the quilt he showed us was genuinely magnificent.

There was something both healing and lasting about standing in front of it. That quilt holds memory. It will be here for generations - a piece of comfort and warmth for the people who love him, no matter what lies ahead, and a testament to the generous, beautiful soul Brad is. We told him he should make a 'free hugs' quilt next and just sit in front of it, because Brad, it turns out, is a hugger, and it was wonderful watching him move through the day surrounded by so much warmth and support from the community around him. Good on you, Brad.

One of the real highlights of our day was meeting Brad's mum too, and sharing a few tears together over his journey. Brad is, in every sense, a giving and beautiful soul, and we're looking forward to sitting down with him for a proper interview in the coming months.

Ang's picks from the open exhibition

We were also set a task: to each choose three quilts from the general public exhibition that stood out to us. Genuinely one of the hardest things we did all day - every single quilt in that hall deserves recognition in some way. But if we had to choose, here's my picks. (Stay tuned for Jo's top 3 next week!)

Flowering Bush by Ludmila Bronshtein (Instagram: @lucy_bronshtien)

What we loved about this one was the colour. Long, cascading petal-like shapes spilled out from the bottom right-hand corner of the quilt, splaying outward across the design. The overall structure was fairly simple, predominantly straight, geometric lines with some curves worked through, but the effect was anything but plain. It had real visual impact: bright purples, oranges and greens sitting against a surrounding field of muted, simple pinstripe fabric. That contrast between the vivid and the quiet is what made it sing - lovely and calming to look at, while still feeling genuinely joyful.

The Watcher by Hannah Gledhill

This quilt caught our eye quite literally. It was built entirely around the repetition of eyes, each one hand-painted with its own subtle variation in the colour of the iris. From a distance, it read almost like a spotted, textural pattern. But the closer you got, the more it revealed itself, and the eerie, watchful feeling of it really landed - it genuinely felt like the quilt was looking back at you. A bright pink border framed the whole thing, adding a lovely jolt of contrast against all that detail. Simple from afar, intricate up close, and properly eye-catching in every sense. Well done to the maker.

Borderless Boundaries by Jongkyeong Lee

This one was extraordinary, almost entirely transparent, rendered in pure monochrome black and white, and reading like an aerial view of a sprawling cityscape or map. What draws people in is that it's genuinely hard to work out how it was made. It turned out to be two layers of organza or polyester fabric fused together using a soldering iron, an inventive, almost improvised technique from a maker based in South Korea. The translucency gives it a real sense of movement, and it was displayed off the wall so you could actually walk around and behind it, which only added to that effect. Graphic, striking, and genuinely borderless in feel. Congratulations to Jongkyeong, a beautiful piece.

And there was one more lovely, unplanned moment: another maker we got chatting to at a nearby stall, while we were admiring Best of Show, turned out to know Jongkyeong personally, and took us over to meet her properly (see the image at the top of this article!). A real treat, and exactly the kind of thing that makes this community what it is.

Because honestly, that's what these shows are about… meeting the makers. We met quilters entering their very first show alongside seasoned artists with an entire exhibition space to themselves, and what never stops amazing us is the generosity, the humanness, and the sheer authenticity of this crowd. It's a genuine pleasure to walk the halls and the stalls meeting the makers, the designers, the fabric printers, the artisans, the advocates for fibre arts, the teachers, the tutors, the students, and the lovers of it all. We walked past hundreds of stalls today, and every single one of them added something.

A special thanks to Jo Sheather, who joined me for this trip. It was a joy watching her have an absolute ball on the long-arm machine, chatting to everyone who came past about all things fibre arts. Thanks for coming along this year Jo, I can't wait to do it all again soon.

A final reflection

If there's one thing this show proved, it's that there really was something for everyone. Something for the minimalist, something for the maximalist. Tiny, mesmerising pixelated pieces of fabric, glued rather than stitched, sitting in the same halls as huge, intricate works produced digitally on enormous long-arm machines. There was merit in all of it.

But if I had to pick a favourite exhibition of the whole festival, it would be Catherine-Marie Longtin's. There was a real resonance for me in the simplicity of her colour work - it reminded me a little of Agnes Martin's reductive paintings, in that you could either get lost in it or walk straight past it, depending on how you looked. But for anyone willing to slow down, the way she plays with contrast, balance and rhythm, without ever tipping into something stuffy or overworked, really hit home for me.

I'm genuinely looking forward to her interview, where we'll get to go deeper into her practice and her philosophy around making, because there's more to Catherine-Marie than meets the eye. She's a sharp, thoughtful woman, with one book just released and another already on the way. She's full of surprises, and not someone to underestimate.

Interested in quilting art?