Originally Posted by
janjanq
Just yesterday I was at a fair and was surprised to see three quilt tops on display. They were hanging right in with the completed quilts. The thing I didn't like is that they were folded to about 18 inches wide so you couldn't see the whole top. However some of the completed quilts were folded in half so you couldn't see all of them either. I suppose to save hanging space. One of the quilt tops won a ribbon but I don't know if it was in a separate category. It was a small fair and there was only about 20 quilts/tops altogether.
In my county fair, if I recall correctly, there is a category for "pieced only" which can be a finished quilt which was quilted by someone other than the exhibitor, a tied quilt, or it can be a quilt top only.
Especially at small fairs there is a bad habit of displaying things by category and not class. I entered my brother's wedding quilt in our county fair a couple of years ago, as a finished quilt entered in the "pieced only" category because I had it professionally quilted but wanted to show off the turtles that took me ages to do (hand-drawn and completely pieced, not applique). I'm still really mad about how they displayed my quilt. Neither my ribbon nor either of the turtles were visible. I get that they don't have space to hang all of the quilts so they can be seen in full... but it isn't that hard to fold this quilt so that one of the turtles is on top, nor to pin the ribbon on the outside!