Great Northern Quilt Show - The Shopping

It's a little less overwhelming at the Harrogate show compared with the Festival Of Quilts. There's still some of the big sellers there and a few smaller ones too. Even the stalls that were at the Festival Of Quilts remain interesting and I often spot things I didn't see, perhaps because it's not quite as crowded.

Again, lots of fabric caught my eye and it was difficult to decide what to buy as I could have spent a fortune there. I bought some embroidery threads almost as soon as I got there. I had a good look round before committing to anything else. I looked for some fabric for binding my robot quilt and came close to buying some but I wasn't totally convinced. I think I'll leave it until I've done some/lots of the quilting as I'll have a better idea of the finished look then.

I was so tempted by lots of the Christmas fabric. I have quite a lot already so managed to stick to just one fat quarter, along with a Halloween spider web FQ.

As in previous years I was drawn to the Images Of Egypt stall. There's a wonderful mix of solids and spotty fabrics that are great for stash building. If you look closely, the packs do vary slightly and I managed to get a lovely pack of FQs in solid colours. I also went for a roll of 3" x 40" strips of hand dyed fabrics.

As you can see I also bought some Christmas ribbon for the advent calendars I plan on making and I was very good and bought some rotary cutter blades. Normally I only buy the Olfa branded ones but the Barnyarns blades were such a bargain (£3.65 for 2 iirc) that I thought I'd take a chance on them. If they're not very good I haven't lost much and if they're fab, I've found a real bargain.

I also saw a lovely Halloween wall hanging at the Quilter's Quarters' stall. It was even better when I asked the price and was told that the other Halloween wall hanging was from the same panel. I snapped one up.

They had added some borders to the middle section to make one hanging and then used the eight little pictures in two rows of 4 to make another. I think I'll change it slightly by using the eight pictures to make a couple of long (vertical) wall hangings.