10 February 2024
Today we were privileged to have Judi Kirk visit us for both the morning presentation and afternoon workshop.
Judi is a qualified quilt judge and a member of the Quilters’ Guild Judging Committee. She has the big task of organising the judges for the largest quilt festival in Europe, The Festival of Quilts at the NEC, in Birmingham, every August. She was also a Tutor and Assessor for the inaugural Master Quilter course.
This morning, Judi’s slide show explained the different categories of show quilts at Festival of Quilts and how to decide which your quilt is best suited for. She explained the odds of entry to winning quilt and emphasised that it really is worth having a go at entering (not just because you really could win, but also because we need entries to keep our quilt shows alive and viable).
The next part of Judi’s presentation was more detailed explanation of how the judging process works and the rules that needed to be followed. Beginning with – ensure your entry is the right size, as famous quilters have been excluded due to this simple failure!
Attention to detail is important. Ensure that the back of your entry is lovely too and don’t forget the correct hanging sleeve and a quilt label. The criteria weights are slightly different in the different categories. Originality is critical in Contemporary and Art quilts, whereas in the traditional section it is perfectly OK to follow a historical quilt design, but you should always credit the designer if relevant.
The judges may disagree on which quilt they prefer, but generally ‘the cream always rises to the top’.
The afternoon workshop was a practical and eye-opening opportunity to be a quilt judge and to prove/disprove Judi’s ‘cream always rises’ theory!
We were given the same judging sheets as used at The Festival of Quilts. Individually we then assessed the 30 or so quilts provided. We completed the sheets, following these judging criteria, and then re-grouped in sets of five or six to rank our top quilts.
At the end, the various groups all had to mark their top quilt rankings on a whiteboard. Judi was right! The same quilts kept appearing on the board (albeit in a slightly different order). So the judging process is robust and ‘the cream does rise to the top’.