Quilt National

Yesssss, I got in!!.
For whatever reason, when I enter shows I always take on the negative attitude that I won't get in.  That way, when the rejection notice comes, I can just shrug and move on. Definitely a way of protecting my myself from the old thumbs down. If I do get accepted, I usually think "oh wow" and start filling out the paperwork.
QN was a little different for me.  A while back I started thinking seriously about what I want to accomplish with my work, and I set some goals.  QN was one, getting my collaboration with my friend Paula, "A View Within", into some galleries or museums is another, and getting my personal work into art shows is a third.  While I believe QN, or any show, is all subjective, to me it's a little bit higher subjective than my local quilt guild show, so I'm really happy to have been accepted.

The piece above is called "Gravitational Forces", and is one of the pieces I submitted to QN for consideration. I'll show you the third one in a few days.
Terry Jarrard Dimond http://studio24-7.blogspot.com wrote an interesting blog yesterday about making art specific for show entries.  I was thinking about this and how my QN piece came about.  I was trying to figure out how I could make a large piece using the wool felt as batting technique I learned from C. June Barnes book "Stitching to Dye in Quilt Art".  With the shrinkage you get from the wool, the large pieces get very wonky on the edges and I was trying to solve this issue.  As you can see above, I figured it out.  I like this piece so much I started thinking, this could be QN worthy.  At that point I realized I would need two more similar pieces for the judges to consider.  I made them and was just as excited by the way they turned out. I want to continue in this series, but am running out of fabric that bleach discharges to this wonderful cream color.  That's ok though, because now I have the challenge of working with colors instead of black, and I have a whole separate blog  in mind to show you my experiments with that.
In thinking about it, I do belong to two different groups, Twelve by Twelve, and Dinner At Eight, that require art work made to specific challenges, but for the most part, I don't enter shows unless I have work that already fits the theme.