One More Contest Quilt

Category: My Crafty Side | Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2006 2:30 pm

This is the last one, I promise. I have pictures of lots more and they all came out great, but the ones I have entered into my blog are the ones I am most pleased with.

Back in 2002 I entered this one in the Dallas Quilt Show competition. It didn't win anything and this time it really surprised me. I went to the show, saw the winners and know that mine was better made than a couple of them. But then I started reading the makers names and affiliations and realized that, as in a lot of the larger quilt shows, you really should be a member of the sponsoring quilt guild to have a chance.
From 2000-2003 there was a line of fabric put out by designer Micheal Miller called Texas Wildflowers...gorgeous stuff. He had come down here in the spring one year, took hundreds of photos along our roadsides of the wildflowers then used them as his inspiration for the fabric. Thousands of yards were sold in Texas alone, the quilt shops couldn't keep it in stock or order it fast enough. Wellllll, almost every entry that won in that contest had used that fabric in someway. The theme for the contest was "Texas Wildflowers" but there was nothing in the rules stating that you had to use that fabric, so I didn't.
Mine is a play on the theme and titled "Well, you said TEXAS wildflowers"

This one could have had something to do with my needle pushing finger too because every part of the design is hand appliqued, most of the stitches are only 1/8th of an inch apart. The black background is quilted in what is called stippling fashion. The quilting lines meander all over the place and each line is no more than 1/4 inch away from the one next to it and no stitching lines cross anywhere. And all the "flowers" are in colors of the real wildflowers found here.

The photographer friend of ours who took the pictures of all my contest quilts, bought this one from me after the competition.