PASSIONATE patchworkers were treated to a 'trunk talk' by former resident Wendy Wild last Friday evening 16 June.

The event was hosted at the Outback Arts Gallery by local quilting group The Material Girls as part of their 20 Year Anniversary celebrations.

Audience members were surrounded by the Material Girls 'Not our First Rodeo' display of 48 quilts that have been on display since the June Long Weekend and enjoyed nibbles and refreshments before Wendy "unpacked her trunk", outlining her personal history of quilt-making.

Ms Wild, who now operates an online business from her new home base in Dubbo catering to the insatiable demand for patchworking products, began her presentation by acknowledging her hosts and their latest exhibition.

"For a small town, the standard of quilting, the diversity and how it's displayed in this wonderful space is quite astounding," she said.

Wendy, a recently-retired registered nurse, has been quilting since 1985 and brought with her a selection of her "favourites" which were held up for admiration by volunteer assistants Helen and Georgia Rackham.

"Every quilt is still my favourite quilt," Ms Wild said as they held up a reproduction-style quilt she had stitched together during meal breaks between shifts at Coonamble Hospital in the pre-internet days.

ABOVE: Helen and Georgia Rackham with Outback Arts Executive Director Jamie-Lee Trindall.

The quilts and the stories followed Wendy's moves from Coonamble to Armidale, to a studio apartment in Melbourne. 

"I began to be very influenced by social media," she said. "It opened my eyes to what creative people were doing all over the world."

"I started to think about my quilting in a new way. I started to think about quilt patterns as an abstraction.

"I now think about things in my life and things around me and how to put them into fabric."

"The last few years I've been thinking about how to embed a story within a quilt," Wendy said.

She told the story of a quilt she’d created recently to celebrate her return to the central-west.  

Her ‘Homeand’ quilt includes representations of how she retreated to her mother’s ancestral home at the property ‘Erdavale’, east of Coonamble.

 After resigning her nursing post at Walgett following the kidnap and murder of a nurse colleague in 1994; of the Teridgerie Creek, her grandmother’s axeminster carpet pattern, and a row of silos - the work effectively maps the special features of her own personal and physical 'landscape' around that sense of refuge.

Wendy's quilting has evolved by experimenting with the flow of colour, adopting the technique of applique, and adapting tried and tested quilt designs to make them easier or to reinterpret them for the modern age.

A couple of years ago a chance conversation with local quilter Amanda Colwell led Wendy to ask a United States-based designer whether she could supply templates to make the process of creating her quilt pattern easier.

"She said 'sure can' and since then I've shipped about two hundred templates to the U.S. alone," said Wendy.

She now collaborates with the designer to host online 'sew alongs'.

ABOVE: Pauline Ditchfield, Kylie Parry, Chandra Raja and Bev Davidson enjoyed a catchup before Wendy Wild’s Trunk Talk.

"In the first year we hosted 800 people, the second year it was 1500," said Wendy. "It has definitely put my business on the map."

Some of Wendy's own quilt designs were also on display, including 'Straighten Up & Fly Right" which was first shown in a digital magazine that Wendy now writes a regular column for.

Wendy's story-telling ability matches her quilting design and construction skills. 

Her audience was entranced and full of questions following the presentation.

The group enjoyed supper together and many also attended a quilting workshop with Wendy on Saturday morning at the CWA Rooms in Castlereagh Street.

If you've missed the 'Not Our First Rodeo' display, it is on show until 7 July at the Outback Arts Gallery.