Est-ce que je peus avoir une théière, s'il vous plait?

I am still in France attending the SAQA "Two by Twenty" and International Threads' exhibition at the Biennale Internationale d'Art Textile. it runs for four days (Wednesday to Saturday, today is the last day), and it has long hours (9.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m.). With very few visitors in the earliest hour and the last hour - it would be much more congenial to the vendors and exhibitors if the opening hours were a little shorter! I have done a blog post on the SAQA presence at the show, one on the International Threads blog, and a bit on my German blog, too. To be honest: I just don't feel like writing more about and uploading pictures to give an impression of the show.
It has high quality and I am impressed with the standard of exhibits, it's wonderful to be here. But I don't really like doing those 'all around impressions' posts of quilt shows. One never does complete justice to all the exhibitors, one can't communicate the atmosphere, and after having done three of them already, please forgive me if I don't indulge in this one here!

I did manage to get some stitching done on my new slow-stitch project, as the quieter hours provide time for that.

And I acquired a new little lamp which is so fabulous - folding, very light, with USB plug and normal plug, well-suited for traveling - that I think I will try to add that to my stock for when I go to market with my fabrics.

Apart from that I have refrained from shopping. Too much to carry anyway. And I do have enough knitting yarn, although I was very tempted to buy a silk-merino combination... but definitely no, even not today at last minute!

But as the audience is made up of almost only French people, my basic French is increasing rapidly. I can now produce the pretty much standard sentences explaining what SAQA is or how International Threads works in an almost fluent fashion. People are impressed with my ability to speak French - until they ask a question in their normal speed and I don't understand much at all. But I have learned one important new vocabulary item at the hotel on my second, where I was getting annoyed at having to get up for every single cup of tea at breakfast (and I drink a lot of tea) and went to the guy at the desk to ask for a tea pot. He managed to understand my gestures, and kindly provided the item itself, and the vocabulary item to go with it. Now I can cooly ask for 'une théière`' every morning, and it saves me a lot of getting up again. So this trip has definitely been an enrichment.
And my Spanish teacher is adamantly convinced that it won't completely upset or delete my attempts at mastering the basics of the Spanish language, to which I will return next week.
One more day now, and then all of International Threads' quilts will be packed back into the red suitcase. Which, I fear, is on its last journey as the extendable handle seems to have jammed and does not want to come out any more. It wouldn't be quite as bad if it were jammed in extended position. But it is not extended, unfortunately. Oh well. I'll get home somehow!

"Slow Stitch"

One of the first things I wrote about for my new job was a short book review of “Slow Stitch” by Claire Wellesley-Smith, which I had bought for myself a few months ago and really enjoyed.

While putting into written words what I had liked about the book I also found an idea for a stack of fabric swatches which I had been hoarding for several years. 

These are swatches for men’s suits which I had been given by a men’s tailor, wonderful woollen fabrics, each approximately 5 x 6 inches in size. They have been waiting in my shelf since I received them, and I had repeatedly tried to figure out how to best put them to use. They could have been turned into a blanket, and perhaps that would have done them justice well enough, but it would have meant to eliminate the gorgeous zigzag edges which all of them have on three of the four sides.

So besides packing the quilts I also started putting swatches to the background, arranging them, and tacking them to get rid of the pins. 

Haven't figured out yet what I am going to do about the zigzag sides and the one non-zigzag side on each of them, which is always on one of the short sides. Right now they're arranged so that not all of them are in the same orientation. Should I do some special stitching there? Or should I be lavish and invest into a pair of zigzag scissors?

Of course, being the kind of person I am, whose scrap quilt projects tend to be with very little pieces for rather large quilts, my current aim of doing a piece this large in ‘slow stitch mode’ is a bit on the ambitious side. 

And I still have to finally decide which threads I am actually going to use, although I have an idea already.

Don’t think I will be stitching this on the train, but there should be opportunity to do some stitching while attending the two exhibitions I will be with.