2016 Nantes
Nantes Quilt Festival - April 2016 - by Helen D
What an adventure we had! The journey was so easy with direct flights from Gatwick to Nantes then a 20 minute bus ride into the centre of Nantes and bingo our hotel was facing us...............so far so good but now of course we had to dust off our school girl French but we were felling confident. Nantes is a lovely city with a beautiful cathedral, a Castle and an old town with large squares dotted with cafes all set on the river so very picturesque so our first day was spent sightseeing around the town. The town has some lovely traditional haberdashery shops all within walking distance of the centre which are really worth exploring too if you have time.
Next we rose early and had breakfast at the hotel with quilters from all round Europe then joined them on the short tram ride to the Exhibition Centre where the Quilt Show was held ....... and it was lovely. It was probably about twice the size of Sandown with great exhibitions and fantastic traders with very different fabrics and gorgeous buttons & trims so a great day was passed with plenty of Euros spent on kits and patterns etc. Just beware that all patterns are in cms not inches and of course are in French so it will be quite a challenge when it comes to making some of them but the kit I made for my new great niece's arrival worked out very well and looked very French ........ funny that!!
So a little European adventure and it was lovely to meet so any quilters from so many countries over cups of tea - we all had so much in common despite the fact in many cases we coundn't really converse so we showed our purchases and did lots of hand signals and smiling - will certainly do it again.