I remember when we moved to this house, my girls used to scoot around to the other side of the house to see the landlords. Our landlords are retired and have grown kids and grandkids of their own, but they’ve always treated us almost as their own as well. When my girls would end up in their part of the yard or I’d send them over to relay some message or other, the girls would always come back clutching a few doppelkeks cookies, large round biscuit cookie sandwiches with a chocolaty hazelnut filling:

The girls used to love these cookies, and I must admit to eating a few myself! Today I visited the landlords (to tell him I needed help with an electrical issue in the kitchen!), and I came home with my own “handful” of cookies:

Our landlady wouldn’t let me leave without sharing an entire plate of the cookies she’s been baking with me. And homemade German cookies are soooo good—Yumm! I couldn’t even get these pics posted before half of them disappeared down the kids’ throats! Time for a coffee and cookie break; add in a couple of quilt magazines, and I’m set.

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Part four of a four part series about entering quilt shows, the jurying and judging process. This series is based on my experiences at quilt shows and classes I’ve taken about the quilt judging process.

The quilt is finished, the photos taken, and now it’s time to fill in the quilt show application. Most of what I’ll tell you here may seem like complete common sense, but I’m going to tell you anyway. Honesty compels me to note that for my very first quilt show app, I had to call the show coordinator and have her label my slides because I forgot to do it before I sent them off! Just slightly embarrassing!

Read the application thoroughly, even if you’ve entered that show in prior years. Rules and categories change, sometimes from year to year! One of the most important things you can do is choose the right category for your quilt. Often, this is the hardest part, because if your quilt could easily fit into more than one category, it’s up to you to choose the best one. If you’ve been to a quilt show, try to remember what types of quilts were in certain categories, and imagine your quilt hanging side by side with those others. Does it fit?

Most applications say to choose the category that represents your quilt’s most prominent technique, and quilts that combine two or more techniques (i.e. piecing/appliqué, appliqué/embroidery, piecing/trapunto, etc.) should be entered in a mixed technique category. Some shows reserve the right to move your quilt to another category if it is really out of place, while others don’t ever move quilts, and the quilts are judged in the category where they were entered whether they fit in or not.

Label everything you send with the application with your name and the quilt name, and anything else the show requires. Some shows are very particular about how they want the slides labeled, so look for a diagram that shows exactly how they want the labels and what information should be included on the slides. Check the deadline, and note whether it’s a “received by” deadline or a “postmark” deadline. Mail early for less stress! Read the rest of this entry »

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Here’s a pic of some of the quilting in the border of the Misery Quilt:

I’m pretty happy with the look, and a couple of really serendipitous things are happening. I’ve quilted all the large motifs around the outside border, and decided to experiment with a bit of echo quilting around this one to see how it would turn out. The first echo line was quited with a darker shade of thread than the design itself, and the second echo line was a shade darker than that.

When I got around to the third echo line, I got tired of not being able to see the quilting lines so well to follow them with the next echo line, so I turned the quilt over and quilted it from the back. When I checked the front again, the “puff” between the second and third echo lines was distinctly fatter than the the rest, so it created a bit of a textural ridged border around the whole motif!

I really have no idea why this happens, but on other parts of the quilt where I’ve quilted two lines of quilting from the top of the quilt that are really close together like this, the puff on the back is raised a bit like a little ridge. I suspect that it’s due to some flaw in the way I’ve basted the thing (not enough pins, not evenly basted or whatever), but as long as I can use this “flaw” to my advantage, who cares?

I plan to quilt more this weekend, because if I don’t that Christmas deadline is going to pass me by. There are shows I want to enter with this quilt next year, and one has an entry deadline of February or March, and if the quilting is done by Christmas I might just make that one. I say “might” because there’s a lot of other stuff I want to do to it after the machine quilting is done that will take some time, and February or March might be cutting it really close. And no, I’m not telling what all that other stuff is either, it’s my little secret for now. Stay tuned!

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