"View from the park"

This is one of the quilts I shipped off to the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham UK earlier this summer. I have blogged about parts of the process with a few little sneak peeks here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

For those of you that are not that familiar with the Festival of Quilts – it is the biggest European quilt festival with around 1000 entries and 30000 visitors. There are 9 different open competitions, from Art Quilts to School Competition.

“View from the park” (104cm * 96cm) is my contribution to this year’s Quilters’ Guild Challenge with the theme “Summer in the city”. Artist’s statement (always a challenge to sum up your artistic vision in 20-30 words…): View from the park – flowers, skyline, blue skies; my favorite memories from visiting a big city in the summer.
The quilt is super simple and heavily quilted with straight lines in different colours. I had lots of ideas for the houses, and was planning to add window shapes in some way, but decided to drop them. I am very glad I did as I’m very pleased with the result. And guess what; so were the judges. I actually won an award! Me! A real monetary award! At the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham!

All the awards were presented at the gala dinner last night, and as I’m right here and not in Birmingham, the international representative of our national quilt association (NQF) called and said she would accept it on my behalf. Now I have people accepting awards on my behalf.

The fun thing is that when I first noticed I had missed a call from UK on Wednesday night I thought Oh no; my quilt is stolen/ruined/did not make it there on time, but then I listened to the lovely lady on my voice mail congratulating me (4 times; listening, not congratulating me) and I exhaled. I was way too excited to get much sleep that first night as an award winning quilter though, and waited anxiously to call her back the next morning.

I definitely want to thank the Big & Strong Program that made it possible for me to jump up and down and run around for quite a while. Happy day indeed.

I was planning to post more pictures, but my photo editing software license expired 12 minutes ago so I have to get a new one. I hope to have it installed in time to show the award when it arrives.-)

Have a fantastic Friday!