Okay, dear blog readers, it’s that time of year again to announce our Quilting Arts Calendar finalists. (I know it seems a little early to be thinking about 2009, but welcome to my world!)
With this year’s theme, “Celebrating Home,” we received 243 entries from around the globe, and many of these entries were very colorful and extremely personal. We loved admiring all of the entries and reading your stories of home, hearth, and childhood. And there were a number of them that had us laughing (we got a fair amount of cute pets at home this year). We thank everyone so much for participating, and hope—even if you are not a finalist—that you enjoyed the process and will display your quilt proudly.
People may wonder how in the world we are able to winnow the lot to a group of finalists. There are a few things the team considers when choosing the quilts:
1. Innovation and creative interpretation of the calendar theme we give you.
2. Mastery of art and design principles, use of surface design, embellishment, color, and quilting techniques.
3. As we are choosing the finalists, we are mindful of how many we have selected that correlate with a certain time of year. (For instance, we don’t want to have 20 entries depicting The Day of the Dead or Flag Day on our hands.)
4. And this is just as important as the above three: Is this quilt something that someone can stare at for an entire month?
One of the reasons I love our reader challenges is I discover new talent. There have been a number of entries from past years that may not have been a good fit for our calendar, but I have filed away for my own reference to follow up for articles and to check artists’ websites and blogs to see what else they are up to.
We ask that the following artists ship their quilt(s) to our offices so they arrive on or by Monday May 5, 2008. We strongly advise that you ship your work via FedEx or UPS to our street address, rather than USPS to our post office address. If you choose to ship via USPS, be sure to send with tracking so you can track your package, and please note they do not deliver to our street address. The address label on the box must have our post office box number—PO Box 685—on the package.
By sending your quilt(s) to us you agree per the challenge entry rules that we may hold onto your quilt(s) through December 31, 2009. (We usually send them back much earlier but we like the right to hold onto them so they can travel with us to national shows.)
Please ship your quilt(s) to:
Quilting Arts
ATTN: 2009 Calendar Contest
23 Gleasondale Rd
PO Box 685 (if using USPS)
Stow, MA
01775
The 2009 Calendar finalists are:
Linda Aavedal
Natalya Aikens (both quilts)
Judy Alexander
Christine Alexiou
Polly Bean (“Home: Nest is Best!”)
Marianne Bettinger
Donna Clauer
Susan Conaway
Michelle Dobrin (both quilts)
Janet Davis
Cait Gordon
Tone Haugen-Cogburn
Linda Johnson
Susan B. Knapp (“Home Planet”)
Marisa Landa-Love
Susan Mayfield
Sylvia Naylor (both quilts)
Deb Nichol
Wen Redmond (both quilts)
Linda Weinstein
Congratulations!