Sewing for Pleasure - 2008 - NEC

On Friday we had our usual annual girls' day out to the NEC for the Sewing for Pleasure show and the four of us thoroughly enjoyed it and declared it an excellent show! Unfortunately my friend's daughter was unable to make it on the day, so my friend decided she'd go again! with her on the Sunday and certainly we found plenty to keep us busy for the entire day and I'm sure her 2nd trip will be good idea!

I was straight in look at the books but this time decided I couldn't find exactly what I wanted and am pleased that I saved my money as I ended up overspending by MILES!!

First purchase was 20 balls of (advertised as) cashmere for £20 from The Black Sheep, my pal, Ann, bought 10 balls of Jaeger fleece for £29 and a super pattern book too!

I went around the whole show about three times in total, picking up bits and pieces here and there including stabilisers, knitting notions, bead/pendants and chains, hoops, and then rather accidentally found a stall selling a magnetic board with rule and strip of magnetic something or other which I was assured would help me with my lace charts! From these ladies I also bought a beading mat which feels like fleece (sort of) and they demonstrated how it helped in working with tiny beads and at £1 I picked one up!

Mostly I was looking for "creative" bits and pieces and found two or three stalls selling a variety, I bought a lot from Stef Francis which you can see below; I bought some soluble fabric and a mini embellishing variety pack from Arthur Ridley and enjoyed his talk on Embellishing machines in one of the lecture rooms too. I bought some fibres for needle felting from Knitting 4 Fun and had a very interesting chat with the stallholders about felting in general, I was tempted to buy some wool and banana & nettle yarn to knit a felted bag but didn't want to rush into a purchase in the last few minutes - I wish I'd gone back to this stall before 5.30pm when they were closing!

I did wonder whether to renew my subscription to Sewing World again this year, but as per usual I did! Slightly cheaper to renew at show time, plus a goodie bag of mostly nothing much! but this time there was a rather smart hobby bag which is quite useful in size.

We enjoyed, too, the fashion show and it was rather nice to sit down for half an hour too!
A lot of walking, the day was tiring and as we'd not finished in time we weren't able to go into the accompanying hall for the Hobbycrafts which was a first for us! Normally we're done by 4.30pm and spend the last hour in there before finishing with a reviving cup of coffee before setting off for home!

Lastly I bought a couple of clip-on LED lights sold half price, £5 each, for the lads after being assured that the cheaper batteries to be found in some shops work just as well, unfortunately the lads weren't as enthusiastic as I thought they might be, and I rather wish I had bought the banana fibre for myself now!! ho-hum!!