As a new quilter who has not entered into the "quilt show" world, this subject fascinates me. Aside from the judging in shows, there is of course judging by any with whom we share our quilts. As some have stated here, there are "quilt snobs" who consider a machine pieced or machine quilted piece to be less of a quilt than one which is pieced an/or quilted by hand.
This made me wonder how our great-great grandmothers may have looked at things. Often their quilts were pieced by them alone, by hand or with a sewing machine. Then, the actual quilting was done by hand, by MANY...at a quilting bee. Do you suppose that any of those quilts were judged at county fairs and the like? Were these quilts judged harshly because they were the work of more than one person? Was it considered a quilting crime to piece a quilt by machine? I know that hand quilting is still sometimes done in a group setting, in fact I would love to participate in one sometime, once I learn how to hand quilt. I just wonder how things were looked at by those who came before us. There seems to be a popular notion that our forebears did everything by hand "because it was better" when in fact, they apparently adopted newer labor-saving methods whenever possible. Isn't it strange that such division exists in the quilting world? Where did this come from?