More on the Fair

Here is a picture of the wedding quilt that our friends so nicely sent back to us with the first place ribbon on it. It took the first for machine quilted article. That was the only category for machine quilted quilts under 72" x 90" that I could enter it in.

I should explain a little more about the Carp Fair I think based on the comments LOL! It takes place in a town called Carp here in Ontario. I've included some links in case you want more information. It's probably the largest Fair based quilt competition in the area. Well, at least it is the largest that I know about :) This fair is part of the Ontario Assosciation of Agricultural Societies (OAAS) so the Best Quilt in Show for both the Hand Quilted Quilt and Machine Quilted Quilt go on to compete at the provincial level in February 2007. I am really excited about this!! I still can hardly believe that my quilt is going to compete at the provincial level. You can see a picture of last years winner for Machine Quilted Quilt here. Isn't it great!? I think that we may travel down for the competition.
This is a picture of my 90" x 108" handquilted "Welsh Beauty" wholecloth quilt that took a second place. It is a preprinted panel by Benartex. My quilt is the one on the bottom. I call this quilt, lovingly, "A Comedy of Errors" because just about everything that could have gone wrong with it did. I have split red wine on it, bled on it, had the kids dirty hands on it and I cut a hole in it. I appliqued a patch over the hole so it was vitually invisible but some of the stains I just couldn't get completely out. Then just when I was about to finally finish the quilt and I was rolling on my 3 rail Hinterburg frame I realised that I didn't have quite enough of the wide backing fabric to go all the way to the top. I was short by only 6". Maybe the clerk thought that I was going to rack the quilt the other way and I didn't; I'm not really sure. Since I purchased the fabric 5 years ago I couldn't really complain:) Luckily I had some extra backing fabric on one of the sides of the quilt that I was saving for the hanging sleeve. So, I had to take the unfinished quilt off the frame, cut the extra backing fabric off the side of the quilt, sew the extra fabric onto the top and reload the quilt onto the frame to finish the quilting. I had to use a different fabric for the hanging sleeve but that's okay. So anyways, I was pretty pleased with the second place ribbon for my stained and damaged quilt :) So the moral of this story is always double check your backing fabric amounts and lay the top on the backing fabric to make sure that there is enough :) By the time that the backing fabric episode happened I just had to laugh because it really was just another thing that went wrong with this quilt :)

If you have anymore questions or comments please feel free to post them here and I will try to answer them.