Originally Posted by
illinois
Being a "traditional" quilter, I hope there are divisions between hand quilted and machine quilted. I have seen some beautiful machine quilting but it makes me sad to go to a quilt show and see that so many have given up hand quilting. I see a huge difference between letting a machine create the stitching (either embroidery or quilting) as compared to what has taken hours of hand work and the skill required to do it well. Are we judging the finished product or the skill required? As to beginner/skilled and the original question. It seems to me that you probably have plenty of divisions with that many entries. The "first time" quilt is probably enough to separate and could be from the person who is now a skilled quilter. You could end up with beginner projects in every age division!
I can't speak for local venues as it varies so much but pretty much all the national shows have separate categories and awards for machine quilted vs hand quilted, which is only right IMHO, they are two completely different art forms and I know, as I used to hand quilt and now I longarm quilt. Make no mistake, when it comes to longarm quilting for many of us the machine is not doing anything more than your domestic sewing machine, which is move the machine needle up and down to form a stitch. There are plenty of hand guided machine quilters (both stationary and movable) that don't use any computer to create the quilting, it is all the skill and talent of the person doing the quilting and many of them don't even have a stitch regulator or quilt without turning it on. I am not one of them, I always quilt in stitch regulated mode. All the stitch regulator does is time the needle up and down movement with the speed of the operator's movement.
AQS further segregates between stationary machine quilted (in a table and the quilter moves the fabric) or movable (aka rack mounted) machine quilted. Unfortunately some shows don't distinguish between hand guided and computer guided and I feel that is wrong, there should be separate categories for computer guided quilting in the interest of complete disclosure for people viewing the quilts. I can recall how when I first started and go to shows and see CG quilting (not knowing it was CG) and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they got every motif exactly the same. Now I can usually tell the difference between CG and HG quilting from sight. But many can't. I was once standing by one of my quilts at a show and two ladies were commenting that it must be computer guided and I piped up and said, no it is all hand guided.