You may or may not remember that I’d actually stuck a quilt into the competition at Festival Of Quilts – I had no thoughts of winning, but I fancied seeing it hung up in all its glory somewhere other than 5 minutes in my pet car park for its original photo shoot! It’s always interesting entering a competition where the results are based entirely on someone’s objective opinion, and I find it a little hard to take it seriously (I’m far more comfortable with a race to a line of some sort) but the results have come back, so I thought I would share them with you.

Here’s a reminder of what they were judging, My Supersized Small World:

At FOQ any quilt which has been professionally long-armed by anyone other than the piecer must be entered into the Joint category, so MSSSW was entered as being by both me and Cath Brough (or Cumbrian Long Armer as you may otherwise know her) As a result of this, it came back with 2 sets of judging slips, the first for the piecing and the second for the quilting.

Piecing Judgement:

Both judges apparently loved the colour and the fabric choices, which was nice, although judge on the right gave me a chuckle because she wrote at the top, ‘Amazing combination of fabrics used here, the colours work so well together’ and then ticked ‘Satisfactory’ in the Design, Composition and Colour section ¯_(ツ)_/¯ . Judge on the right also didn’t spot the applique, so I’m not sure if that makes me amazing at it or not… ;o)

Anyway. it’s nice to know that for the most part the time I spent on trying to make this as accurate, colourful and fun as possible was ‘Good’ in the eyes of the judges. I also got word from someone that overheard Kaffe Fassett admiring it, and Jen Kingwell was lovely enough to give me a shout out in her lecture (which I wasn’t actually able to go to, but apparently it entertained those that were there who knew me). Several people stopped me to tell me, both when I happened to be near it and on IG, that it made them happy, which was really nice, as honestly, I did just want to cheer people (including myself) up with it.

Quilting Judgement:

The long-arming judges wren’t quite such big fans, one thought the quilting design a little too complex for the piecing design, but that really wasn’t Cath’s fault as it was entirely my choice! (Dictator? Moi?) Still, we did get one excellent with ‘Overall Appearance’, which actually means it hangs well, with square corners, no quilting distortion, thread tails or visible marking and is clean with no smell, so, not really ‘Does it look good?’ as you might have thought :oD

So Would I Do It Again?

Eh, maybe. I’m not going to go all out just to make a quilt for a competition, but if I happen to make something I’m proud of, I might enter again (although I really hope that if I do they’ll have sorted the complete shambles around the collection of quilts at the end!)