The Stitch Festival 2020
Image: Red Ribbons (c) Kaffe Fassett. Photo by Stephen Wooster.
The Stitch Festival – formerly called the The Spring Knitting & Stitching Show – comes to London’s Business Design Centre on 27th February. The Festival hosts hundreds of workshops, demonstrations, drop-in areas, exhibitions, textile installations, and exhibitors selling specialist craft supplies. The exhibitions include costumes created for film from Esme Young’s archive, quilts from Kaffe Fassett and needlework from Olga Prinku.
The Kaffe Fassett exhibition is a selection of Kaffe’s Quilts in America. After deciding he would like to make his 20th anniversary Taunton quilt book based on the quilt collection at the American Museum in Bath, Kaffe and his team chose their favourites from the collection and made new interpretations of them in 2016 and 2017 using the latest fabrics from the Kaffe Fassett Collective and a few Artisan fabrics. The collection at the American Museum had never been shown outside Britain so Quilts in America shows off some of those antique beauties, along with their modern Kaffe inspired counterparts.
Image: Dotty Fans (c) Kaffe Fassett. Photo by Stephen Wooster.
Designer-maker Olga Prinku will be exhibiting a selection of her works: Flowers on Tulle Embroidery. Olga – who has collaborated with companies including Anthropologie and Swarovski – started the practice almost by accident: “All my embroidery skills are self-taught. It was a bit of an accident after working and experimenting with wreath making for several years. I didn't start with the embroidery process - the connection came much later. Once I experimented with using a garden sieve as a base for a wreath. I then had a dream about a dress with real flowers embroidered on the top. The structure of the sieve is not that different from the net structure of tulle, so when I next saw tulle in a shop, I remembered the dream and thought I must give that idea a go.”
The Stitch Festival is in London from 27th February – 1st March 2020. For more information visit www.thestitchfestival.co.uk
Selvedge blog readers can buy discounted tickets using the code SVG2020 at checkout, valid for advanced bookings made before 26th February.
