A month or so ago I posted a picture thread about my first quilt show quilt. The show was this weekend and though it's been a rocky one, I survived. :)
There were a few problems with the ribbons being awarded and Saturday when the show opened I found my quilt with no ribbon. Such is life, I didn't let it bum me out. What did bum me out was the lack of category organization. There was no way to tell what quilt was in what category as they weren't hung in any order and their entry number was just a number, no letters denoting the category. The booklet just had a description of each quilt with again, no category. You had no idea what quilts yours were judged against. Some deductive reasoning helped me find a few that might have been in my category (I was in the individual/pieced category) but it was hard to tell if they might have been in the New Quilter or Youth category instead.
Anyways, long story short I get my judges comment card when I picked my quilt up today and to my surprise on the line titled "Award" it says, Hon. Mention. I asked one of the ladies if that meant I was supposed to have gotten a ribbon. She looked a little surprised and said, "Your quilt didn't have a ribbon attached?", "No ma'am." They're mailing me one. The rest of the comment card was as follows;
Visual Impact: "Strong Impact"
Technical Construction: "Excellent"
Quilting: "Excellent"
Additional Comments: "Love the touches of beads"
"Hold for machine quilting" was also wrote on the page. I guess maybe I was a contender for the Best Machine Quilting award? Unfortunately no constructive comments as to where I could have improved so I really have no idea where my quilt fell short and therefore only received Honorable Mention. I was actually really looking forward to seeing those. Apparently the judge did her job quickly and blew out of there leaving the ladies running the show with a lot of questions. Some ribbons changed places during the two days of the show and some quilts that had ribbons on Saturday, didn't have them on Sunday. Pretty hard to tell what anyone actually won. My "Honorable Mention" is wrote in a totally different handwriting than the judges comments. May mean nothing but with all the other problems it leaves you wondering.
Thankfully I know the way this show went isn't the norm for shows so I will be continuing to show. I have another quilt in the works and I think I will give Assorted Gems another shot at being judged.