My first trip down to the Swansea area for a Quilter?s Guild event turned out to be great fun. Because of the distance involved, my husband and I decided to make a weekend of it and booked a B&B for the night. We were lucky with the weather and whilst hubby spent the day off walking along the beautiful Mumbles coast, I had a lovely day at the Saint Pauls Parish Centre.

The hall was bright and the acoustics good. I spent some cash with the trader, Pelenna Patchworks, who had some lovely fabrics. Wendy and Dian had organised a tombola and sales table.

Our speaker was Lynn Kinsey who told us all about a trip she had made to the USA some years previously. Lucky Lynn went to the Houston Quilt show and was able to show us lots of lovely images of the amazing quilts that she saw there. I had real quilt trip envy! From what Lynn said it seems that it is such a huge show, that you need at least four days to do it justice.

After a packed lunch and lots of cups of tea, we were treated to a mini talk from Dian. She showed us a project that she was working on creating fabric from old unwanted ties. Dian had us laughing at the nature of the inappropriate ties that had been donated to her from male colleagues. I think that she is a brave woman because I certainly wouldn?t want to tackle working with slippery fabric on the bias but she had done a good job of joining the ties to make cushions and bags.

Later in the day after more tea and cake Wendy had us playing strip (square) poker. If you haven?t had a go of this, you should. It was hilarious. Each table of six people had three die to throw. The options on the die were L=pass to the left, R=pass to the right and C=put one in the centre. We were given a pile of squares of fabric and shared them out before beginning the game. One nice aspect of the game was, that when all your squares were gone, you could still play as others sometimes passed you squares. The person with all the squares at the end was the winner and took home the squares to make into a quilt. There was an awful lot of laughter during the game.

Thanks Wendy and Dian it was a great day.