Quilting Arts Blog

There’s No Place Like Home––Announcing the Quilting Arts 2009 Calendar Winners

"Window into Home 2" by Natalya Aikens

We said we’d publicize the 2009 Quilting Arts “Celebrate Home” Calendar winners on May 23, but hey, the decision has been made so why keep mum about it? (Plus we want to display the winning quilts at Quilt Market in Portland later this week in our booth, and it really wouldn’t be fair of us to display those quilts without first letting you know, now would it!)

As usual, the decision was very difficult as the quilts that came into our offices were spectacular this time around. However, after much deliberation, the crew came up with a beautiful and inspiring assembly of quilts that I’m sure will delight.

I’d briefly mentioned in a previous post how we narrow the lot to a group of finalists, and once those quilts arrive, there are some intense discussions that take place. We each choose 13 of our favorites, then we meet as a group to discuss them, and lastly we begin laying them out by month. (This is actually one of the more heated annual discussions we have at Quilting Arts because we all feel so passionately about our choices!) We ask questions and move quilts around as we talk through the final grouping. Would this be a good January? Is this quilt representative enough for July? Would this quilt make a smashing cover? Did this artist interpret the theme closely enough? Do we have two blue quilts in a row and should we rethink the order we’ve placed them? Do we have a wide variety of styles?

When we stepped back from the lot, we noticed we had a rather diverse group of artwork for this particular calendar. All of the quilts are lovely, and we really hope you’ll enjoy the 2009 calendar as much as we plan to.

Congratulations to:

Natalya Aikens
Pleasantville, NY

Susan Mayfield
San Antonio, TX

Sylvia Naylor
Cambridge, Ontario, Canada

Cait Gordon
Bunbury, Western Australia

Susan Brubaker-Knapp
Mooresville, NC

Polly Bean
Great Falls, VA

Tone Haugen-Cogburn
Maryville, TN

Judy Alexander
Marietta, GA

Marisa Landa-Love
Camarillo, CA

Donna Clauer
Bel Air, MD

Linda Nelson Johnson
Moscow, ID

Marianne Bettinger
Albuquerque, NM

Michelle Dobrin
Windsor, Ontario, Canada

2009 Quilting Arts Calendar Finalists

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!