What excitement – a brief answer-phone message from Grosvenor Exhibitions congratulated me on winning the Sue Belton Cup today. Tomorrow I’ll be on the bus with friends, heading for Harrogate to see the Show and it’ll be even more fun than usual. I don’t know a great deal about Sue Belton except that she was a founder member of both The Quilters’ Guild and Garstang Patchers and, I gather, did some work with Rebecca Collins. I’ve been having a brilliant time recently talking to new quilters who are joining my Quilt Workshop Series and this is like the icing on the cake. The quilt is based on information from the book ‘The Celtic Wisdom of Trees’ written by Jane Gifford, which gives fascinating facts about trees as they relate to people’s birthdays – the colours, words, deities, healing properties etc associated with them. My tree is the elder, one I have always loved for it’s flowers and berries in particular, so it was easy to use it as inspiration for a quilt. Some of the fabrics are dyed with berries or bark, using different mordants and black and dark green are the colours associated with elder. The leaves and flowers appear as appliqué as well as in the quilting. Dorothy. 3rd September 2009