Originally Posted by
Christine-
I attended the Mid-Atlantic quilt festival in February and noticed there were far fewer quilts than the last time I was there. The last time the quilts seemed to never end! Quilts were squeezed into every spare inch and it took hours to view them all. I came home with 300+ photos, and even then I only took photos of quilts I liked.
This year, part of the convention hall was simply empty. Huge empty spaces. After I walked through the wallhanging entries I said, 'where are the rest of them?" It was still a very good quilt show, but I was a little disappointed in the number of quilts. Especially after knowing what should have been there. After the McCalls magazine article, could it be that quilters simply threw up their hands and said "Forget it!" We'll never know, probably, but it would be interesting to know if other quilt shows had reduced numbers in quilt entries.
this is actually a sign of the time...while in today's world quilter's are faster to make than ever, the quality is often lesser than what most shows require to be in a judge setting. The cost of making, shipping, insuring, etc also set the bar higher than it used to be. Groups are disbanding and taking most of the challenges with them, it is a lot of different factors these days!