The Scottish Quilt Championships are staged in The Royal Highland Centre outside Edinburgh, a venue close to Edinburgh Airport and well served by good roads and signage, with absolutely no need to get involved with city traffic! The car park is free, and a kind gentleman in a steward’s uniform saw me across the road to the hall, even though there were scarcely any cars about. I say ‘staged’ advisedly, because walking into the show hall is very much like walking onto a stage, albeit a very large one. The walls and ceiling are black and the carpet dark grey, which might be considered oppressive but which I find exciting; there is an air of drama and the competition quilts are displayed with the panache of a theatrical event.
There is drama too in finding out which quilts have won the rosettes. Judging art, whether painting, pottery or needlework, can never be as simple as adding up the correct answers on an arithmetic paper and having been to The Great Northern Quilt Show a few weeks earlier I found it fascinating to see how some quilts that were entered in both shows had fared. For example, Claudia Taeubert’s large wall hanging entitled ‘Why Count Sheep? Count Stars!’, longarm quilted by Birgit Schueller, collected the award for Hand-Guided Longarm Machine Quilting at both shows. Consummate hand quilter Andrea Stracke won first prize in the Cot Quilt category at both shows with her exquisite piece ‘Adamine’, which also took the Wholecloth award at the Great Northern, whereas this time the Wholecloth award went to Andrea’s full-size bed quilt, ‘Sapphirine’. It is such a pity that taking good photographs of whole cloth quilts in show conditions is so difficult because both quilts were wonderful to see firsthand but have not turned out so well in my photos. My apologies.
In addition, Anne-Marie Tye’s beautiful miniature quilt, ‘Baltimore to Burray’, which took second in the Miniature class at the Great Northern, moved up to first place at the Scottish Championships and was Overall Champion too – a marvel of minute hand appliqué as well as of striking design.
This story is from the January 2018 edition of Patchwork and Quilting.
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This story is from the January 2018 edition of Patchwork and Quilting.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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