Mills County Quilt Show

So yesterday I take a break from sorting, and go to a quilt show that I've actually entered a quilt in.  It's the kitten quilt a few posts back, entered into the wall hanging division.  I'll tell you how I did later in the post.
Anyway, it's a long drive from nowhere to get to nowhere but several of us from the Voca Quilt Club do this every year.  And many of us place in the divisions we enter.  We always enter hand stitched pieces, since that's what we do the most of and it's a dying art form that is being pushed aside by the big name fabric companies in favor of the faster machine quilting.  Most entries in these shows now are machine pieced.
This was my 4th year attending and my second year entering.  Last year I landed 3rd place (peoples choice voting) behind a first place heavy machine quilted boot and a second place Dick/Jane panel that had been loosely stitched.  My entry was hand appliqued passion flowers and hand stitched, all in batiks.  But that's ok, I at least placed!  And this was the quilt (notice, the first place winner to the right, remember that....)

And a close up if you'd like to see it:

We arrive today and begin to sort through all the entries with our ballots in hand.  The show's theme category this year was "Western".  I finally make it back to the section of wall hangings and there to my surprise, shock and possible horror was my kitten quilt sitting to the right of that same boot from last year..... I about had a heart attack until I saw that it had been entered into the theme category instead of the wall hanging category.  No way was I willing to lose to the boot again this year!
As the votes were being tallied we did our shopping, they had a nice 'general store' section with leftovers and scraps and such from their club/guild members and I landed myself a bunch of pre-cut, pre-marked and in many cases pre-hand sewn pieces and parts, all for $5.  I won a door prize right near the end, 2 patterns, holiday baskets and plaid chickens on log cabin like blocks.

And so, our winnings for this year, one of our group won second in the Western category with red work cowboys and first in the contemporary category with a hand stitched, hand appliqued, quilt!  Another of our group won second place in the contemporary category with a name quilt (Voca quilters names).  As for me..... I placed second this time, loosing first place to a more honorable foe, machine embroidered chickens.  I can handle that, I liked the chickens, they were cool looking for machine work ;)
My quilt if you don't want to go hunting back through the old posts: Curiosity and the Kitten