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