Regina Quilt Show -- I Won! I Can't Believe It!

My two ribbons and me. Maybe I should have done something
more with my hair?

This year, I decided to enter four quilts into the Regina Quilt Show. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but my I Spy quilt placed third in its category and won over all for the best use of colour!

I got two fancy ribbons which the kids oohed and aahed over. Then there was general feed back on all of my quilts (yes, they noticed the red wine stain on my citrus quilt and it was noted on the sheet).

The only thing that really bothered me was the placement of my citrus quilt which was put in the darkest corner of the show. Boo.

The flash makes the citrus quilt a bit brighter, but the
lighting in this corner was terrible!

This ribbon for best use of colour really makes me think about things. In a previous post, I commented that I felt debilitated by colour and as a result tend to pick colours that I know will work. I accept that black works with brown because Coco Chanel did it sixty years ago (or more!), but without Coco, I would never try something so radical.

But then I win this award. Out of the hundreds of entries, I got the one for best use of colour. I don't quite know what to think.

(I also know that my citrus quilt was also in the running for the colour category because they had marked both sheets with "*colour." I really don't know what to think now. My quilts were competing with each other for colour!)

The Need for Slow Quilting

The Citrus Quilt Fall 2011

There is the slow food movement. It inspires us to think about our food, prepare our dinner, enjoy our meal. It makes food into something that requires care and attention, where part of the value is created in the process.

I believe there should be a movement for slow quilting, where care and attention is paid to each piece. Let's do hand sewing. Let's design our own patterns. Let's make something that really pleases us. And after this is all done, let's start something new from what we have learned.

It seems to me that many quilting magazines advertize Quick Quilts. These are projects that can be finished in a day of work. Unless you are selling them, or you are very, very cold, you do not need to finish a quilt in a weekend.

Instead, let's make really tricky quilts that will take a year to complete. If I've got another 50 years in me (maybe I do, maybe I don't), I will still have an insane closet full of completed quilts. But they will be very complicated quilts. And I hope very beautiful.

So let's slow down. Work slowly with passion. Make something beautiful. Challenge ourselves. Reduce clutter. Conserve our resources. Exercise our creativity.

Let's try Slow Quilting.