Last week was fair week. I entered 5 quilts, and a pirate costume I made for my daughter last year. I got two blue ribbons, and two red ribbons on my quilts, and a red ribbon for the costume. I won the special award for miniatures with my paper pieced lighthouse quilt- "A Light in the Storm" It is made from a commercial pattern, which was very nice - all of the paper piecing patterns were included, and there were a lot of them! I need to figure out how many pieces in this quilt because there are so many. I had a lot of fun making it, and decided to hand quilt it because according to the rules at last year's quilt show it was too large to be a miniature (or so I thought). According to the applications for this years show it just makes it as a miniature - yeah!! Anyway, the machine quilted category for wall-hangings is huge, but there were only a few hand quilted ones last year, so I thought by hand quilting it I would stand a better chance of winning a ribbon on it. Oh well! It won at the fair, so I hope it does well at the show in Sept. The one thing about the show is that the ribbons are awarded by public voting, so it's not always the best technical work that wins, but the most eye catching. I try to enter something in the miniatures every year - it's a small but competitive category! Plus, I just like to make them, so it gives me a good excuse to come up with yet another small quilt.
