FOQ 2026 - the aftermath
It’s one week since I flew from the Isle of Man to Birmingham for my first Festival of Quilts. A long overdue trip that I was determined to make time for this year. Funnily enough, I didn’t wish I had done it sooner - I know that the time was just right this year. I went across on the Thursday - had a half day Thursday, all day Friday and Saturday and flew home again on the Sunday morning without attending anything that day. For me, it was a great amount of time, not least because there is so much to see, it’s hard not to get spun around and turn yourself inside out with the sheer volume of stalls and quilts in the NEC, but because I had time for everything and every one. I didn’t want to feel like spending time with people was at the cost of not seeing the quilts on show, or seeing the stalls, and equally I was not about to miss out on the real reason I went - the connections with people in real life - for any bolt of fabric or notion out there.
Recommendations - I was going to put these were for first timers, but on reflection I think these are good for any-timers:
BUSINESS CARDS- If you are in the business of quilting, whether a quilt pattern designer, long armer, tech editor, fabric designer or anything in between, get yourself a stack of business cards and take them. Do not be shy about handing them out. Ensure they are mat finish so they can be written on in biro easily. It may sound old fashioned in a digital age, but a business card back at the hotel room, or when you return home sparks a memory of an encounter, a conversation, a connection, and intention - and it is worth its weight in gold. I designed mine in Canva, and used PrintWorks in the UK, and thought their service and final product was fantastic!
STAY CLOSE - The NEC in Birmingham is a brilliant venue, and well appointed with the free AirTrack monorail serving the train station, airport and NEC. Around all of it are countless hotels. There are plenty more hotels the further out you go, served during the NEC by a free shuttle bus, however my top tip would be to stay at one of the hotels closest to the NEC (often branded ‘Hotel Brand - NEC or Airport’ for ease! It really made my stay far less stressful. No figuring out where the shuttle did or didn’t stop at, no travel time or waiting on transport, no worry about what time I got back and whether it would be deserted, and most importantly no extra cost. From door-to-door of my hotel room to the NEC was under 15 minutes and I was on the move the whole time.
TAKE ALL THE PHOTOS - When you are in the NEC itself take all the photos you need - don’t feel daft! Whether it’s selfies with people you’ve met, or those you’ve wanted to meet for years that inspire you, of fabrics you have an idea for, of fabric you have absolutely no idea for, quilting techniques, colour combinations that inspire you, and most importantly, the entry plaques of competition quilts. They each hold the name of both the quilter and quilt itself - together with the social media handle (if available) to help you connect with them after the show.
CASH IS KING - Whilst the NEC hails itself as a cashless venue I would absolutely recommend you take some cold hard cash. Firstly, because there were a few vendors machines that didn’t play ball all the time, and a few items, like the Quilters Guild annual FOQ pin badge that was cash only. It’s important to remember there are a lot of stallholders exhibiting who will be charged for every single cashless transaction made, so many will happily take cash, and welcome it in order to avoid fees where at all possible.
SAY THE THING - This one makes me emotional even thinking about adding it, but I think it’s important to encourage people to say the thing. If you feel it, say it. If you’ve looked at an entry, an outfit, a stall, or a gallery of quilts that has taken someone months if not years to put together to showcase in order to make the Festival of Quilts, and the industry, what it is today - and you’ve loved it, or it brought you to tears, or you were inspired in any way SAY IT. If you get the opportunity to approach the maker or business owner (or general outfit wearer!) take it because I genuinely believe it is what makes the world go round. It is that exact type of connection, kindness and sharing that means a rising tide lifts all ships. I saw so much of it going on throughout the event, and I would have paid my ticket price just to witness that alone. It is absolutely my jam to know others have left there just a little bit taller, and re-fuelled to tackle their next creation.
CONNECT AFTERWARDS - I would really encourage everyone to keep some time aside when you get back to your hotel room each night to make the online connections. Convert the human into the digital. Search out the names of the exhibitors from the photos you took of their plaques and follow them, heck - scroll through and like or comment on their posts. Find the stalls you loved and shoped at, and the ones you couldn’t on the day but want to remember for later, follow and drop them a message. It all helps raise the profile of these awesome creators and businesses that we want to see come back year after year. They can’t do that as easily (or in some cases at all) if they don’t keep reaching people online, making sales, boosting profiles and being found by new people. It really does make a difference - and often means those on the day connections start to grow a real relationship and community spirit.
SHARE ON SOCIALS - Similar to the point above, if you are on social media, whatever your platform of choice, share your photos, your take homes from the day, the artists that inspired you. There are so many quilters and creatives who either couldn’t attend, or don’t yet know about it - your posts might just be the one they see and realise there’s a whole community waiting to embrace them! That was how it was for me. I saw all the QuiltCon posts earlier in 2026, and whilst I couldn’t have gone to QuiltCon I vowed not to miss another Festival of Quilts that I could reasonably get to.
Festival of quilts 2026 - the anticipation…
Next week I go to the Festival of Quilts for the first time.
I say that slightly sheepishly, as someone who has spent a good while now with fabric, patterns and a seam ripper within arm's reach. But there it is: five days from now I'll be walking into the NEC in Birmingham, first-timer's lanyard on, entirely aware that everyone around me has done this before, knows which hall to start in, and has brought a large enough suitcase with them for the heavier homeward journey.
I'm flying in, so a trolley isn't in my future. I have, however, packed light on the way out entirely so that there is room in the bag on the way back. First-timer, perhaps. Naive, no.
The Festival began in 2003, launched in partnership with The Quilters' Guild, and has grown into the biggest quilting show in Europe — over twenty thousand people, more than two hundred stands, workshops and talks and galleries of work by artists whose names you'll know from the spines of your books. That growth is impressive on its own. But it isn't the part that makes me want to go.
This is the part. The Festival runs the largest open quilt competition in the world, and open is the operative word: quilts are not juried. There is no panel deciding in advance whose work is worthy of the wall. If you enter, and your quilt fits its category and follows the rules, it hangs — alongside more than a thousand others, seen by thousands of people, in sixteen categories that make room for novices and young quilters as deliberately as for the seasoned. There are even bursaries for makers who want to enter but for whom the cost would otherwise be the thing that stopped them.
Think about how unusual that is. Most competitive exhibitions in most disciplines begin by narrowing — a jury, a shortlist, a polite letter to everyone else. This one begins by opening. It says: bring what you made, we will hang it, someone will stand in front of it.
And I'd argue it's a very British piece of thinking, in the best sense. It's the same instinct as the village fête and the county show — the ethos of having a go, of the amateur in the original meaning of the word, the one who does it for love. We are, as a nation, quietly brilliant at this: at making room for the person who isn't sure they're good enough yet, and then hanging their work at eye level next to a master's. It isn't lowering the bar. It's widening the door. And a craft with a door that wide is a craft with a future, because that's where the next generation of makers walks in.
I'm going with slightly odd eyes, though — and this is the thing I've been thinking about most. I'll be there as a quilter, of course. But I'll also be there as a pattern designer and a technical editor, which means I'll be looking at things I suspect most visitors won't: how information is presented on a stand, how a pattern cover has to work from three feet away, what a well-constructed set of instructions does to a finished quilt versus a muddled one. I'll be reading the backs of quilts. I'll be looking at bindings the way other people look at brushwork. First time in the building, but not quite first time to the subject — and I'm curious whether that combination will make the whole thing sharper or simply mean I miss the obvious.
The business cards arrived, by the way, and are primed and ready — pinked edge and all. That felt like a small ceremony: the first physical object of this venture, sitting in a box on the desk, waiting for the first hand to put one into.
But here's what I'm actually looking forward to, and it isn't the stands.
It's the people. There's a string of them — other pattern writers and designers who have been my support network through all of this, several of whom I'll be meeting in person for the very first time despite months of messages, drafts, encouragement and honest feedback. This is one of the strange gifts of working the way we now do: you can build a genuine working friendship with someone entirely through a screen and then meet them for the first time in a hall in Birmingham and know exactly who they are.
And some of them are family. Quilting brought me back into step with my aunty and my cousin — a shared love turning into a shared language, and then into plans, and now into a week in the diary. That's the thing about this craft: it doesn't only make objects. It makes reconnections. It gives you a reason to be in the same place as the people you'd like to be in the same place as.
So if you're going — 30 July to 2 August, NEC Birmingham — and should you spot me, please say hello. Maker, designer, first-timer, or someone who's been going for twenty years and brought the right sort of suitcase for just this event. Especially that last one.
Meg
Founder, Huckstep Atelier
The Isle of Man
THe unglamorous middle
Nobody photographs this part.
The first collection is currently at the stage that no brand shows you: the pattern is back from its technical edit, and I am working through the markups line by line. Not the styled flat lay, not the finished quilt over a garden chair at golden hour — just me, a screen full of margin notes, and the quiet discipline of checking that every number tells the truth.
I want to write about this stage precisely because it is invisible. When a pattern finally arrives in your hands, it performs a kind of magic trick: it looks inevitable, as though it simply emerged whole. It didn't. Between the finished quilt and the finished pattern sits weeks of unglamorous verification — and I would argue this stage, not the design, is where a pattern earns your trust.
Here is what it actually looks like. Every measurement gets checked against the geometry it claims to produce — not read and nodded at, but recalculated from first principles, as though the person who wrote it (me) cannot be trusted (correct — no author can proofread their own mathematics; you see what you meant, not what you typed). Yardage and metreage are worked out again from the cutting requirements, then once more with sensible margins for the realities of cloth and being human. Diagrams are compared against the words beside them, because a drawing and a sentence that disagree will send a maker's rotary cutter in two directions at once. Terminology is made to behave — a unit called one thing on page six must not reappear under an alias on page nineteen. And then the copy itself is read aloud, slowly, the way a maker will actually meet it: mid-project, slightly tired, seam ripper within reach, deserving of sentences that don't make things worse.
An independent set of eyes belongs in that process, and mine had one — a technical editor who queried, corrected, and improved this pattern in ways I couldn't have managed alone, because I breathed it into existence. If you take one practical lesson from this post, whether you make quilts or write patterns for them: the edit is not the stage you skip when time runs short. It is the stage everything else exists to protect. I edit other designers' patterns for a living, and I still would not release my own without someone checking my working. That isn't insecurity. That's the standard.
There is also, I'll admit, an unexpected pleasure in it. Editing your own pattern is the first time you meet your work as a stranger — the first time the design stopped being a thing I was making and became a thing I was reading. Somewhere between the yardage tables and the final proof, a pattern turns into a publication. That's the moment this whole endeavour was built for, and it happens in red ink, not golden hour.
So that is where things stand: the first Look of Collection 01 is in its final pass, close enough to release that I've stopped saying "eventually" and started saying "soon." The shop will open when the numbers have been proven and not a day before — a pattern is a promise.
And one more thing, for those of you in the same corner of the world: at the end of this month I'll be at the Festival of Quilts at the NEC in Birmingham, wandering the aisles with cards in my pocket and always delighted to connect. If you're going, and you spot me, say hello — whether you're a maker, a designer curious about technical editing, or simply someone who also believes the middle of things deserves more credit. Connection is, after all, the entire point.
Meg
Founder, Huckstep Atelier
The Isle of Man
a story of beginning
Every brand has a founding story, and convention says it should begin with lightning — the midnight idea, the napkin sketch, the moment everything changed. Mine begins somewhere quieter: with the slow realisation that the thing I wanted to buy did not exist, and the slower one that I was going to have to build it.
I have spent my life with a love and curiosity for surface pattern and textile design, and my whole life dipping in and out of British textile heritage — it runs through my family the way it runs through this country, mostly unremarked, entirely load-bearing. When I came to quilt pattern writing, I came to it as a designer, and I noticed something almost immediately: the quilts were extraordinary, and the patterns were leaflets. Beautiful work, delivered like an instruction manual. The design was in the quilt; it had rarely been invited into the pattern.
And I kept thinking about fashion houses. About how they release work — in seasons, as collections, each piece considered against the whole. About lookbooks, where a garment arrives with its story attached: the reference, the palette, the reason. That structure isn't pomp — it's respect, for the work and for the person receiving it. Nobody hands you a couture gown with a photocopied diagram. Why should hours of your making life deserve less?
So: Huckstep Atelier. A British design house working in quilt patterns, run from a studio on the Isle of Man — an island that gave Liberty its Archibald Knox, and gave me a place where making things properly still counts as a personality trait.
Here is what makes Huckstep Atelier different, stated as plainly as I can manage.
The patterns are publications. Each one is built as an editorial object — with source notes, so you know the history you're sewing; with named and reasoned colourways; with instructions written in full sentences by someone who believes you deserve them. It is designed to live on your bookshelf, not forgotten in a drawer.
The work is released in collections. Seasons. Collections. Each design is a Look; each palette an Expression. Collection 01 — SS26 — opens with a design rooted in the British summer: in deckchair stripes and the hush of a July grass court, and in the colours a movement of remarkable women once wore on their sashes. Its companion piece follows behind it. I won't say more yet; some things are worth keeping back a little longer.
The mathematics are non-negotiable. One thread within Huckstep Atelier is that of technical editor, checking other designers' patterns from first principles, drawing on over two decades of professional copy writing, proofreading and editing. Every yardage, every cut, every seam. That discipline is permanent: nothing gets released until the numbers have been proven, because a pattern is a promise from designer to maker.
And the pace is deliberate. You will never see a pattern a fortnight from me. I would rather do one thing properly than four things approximately — and if that sentence made you exhale rather than frown, Huckstep Atelier was built for you.
What can you expect from here? The Collection Register will fill, slowly and on purpose. This journal will carry the working notes — the research behind each design, findings from the archive, the histories of the women who quilted before us, and the occasional honest account of what it is actually like to build a design house from a small island in the Irish Sea. And for those who leave their address, The Journal letter will bring collection news first — sent when there is something worth saying, and not before. If you would like to have insights on what is going on more frequently, please join us on Instagram via the socials button in the footer.
Welcome to Huckstep Atelier. I'm so glad you're here.
Meg
Founder, Huckstep Atelier
The Isle of Man