Marilyn Badger Lecture

We are so privileged to have award winning quilter Marilyn Badger as a member of our guild. On Saturday she brought a few quilts and told us of her experience working as a judge at IQA Houston 2009.

Marilyn gave us a lot of tips and suggestions if we ever want to place a quilt in a National Show. That won't be me, but there are several in our group who have that kind of talent.
I found Marilyn's experience as a judge very fascinating. She is gracious and warm and so willing to share with us the things she has learned.

Marilyn, Sue Nickels, and Linda Roy served as the judges and they juried 377 quilts in 3 days last August. Sounds exhausting to me, but she said she loved the experience so much she was ready for the committee to bring in more.

This is the the Judge's Critique Form that was used. There are 21 categories for Houston, and $100,000 dollars was given away. Art Quilts was the largest category, Hand Quilting and Miniatures were the smallest categories.

Awesome Blossom has now won 3 Best of Shows.

Marilyn co-creates her award winning quilts with Claudia Clark Myers. They started sending quilts off for competitions in 2002, and have now done 14 quilts together.
Marilyn said the #1 thing that a judge looks for is Visual Impact. They worked with a process called "flip and release". If a quilt doesn't have good visual impact in originality and design, it was released and no longer in the competition.

Marilyn felt that Judges should not get into the design of the quilt, and that they should just pay attention to execution.

Many pattern designs will win, but often if it comes down to 1st or 2nd place, a judge will select an original.

I recently saw Awesome Blossom in the Aug/ Sept 2009 edition of Quilters Newsletter.

Berry Patch was a 1st Place Winner at Paducah

Some of the things I learned: If you are paid to do a quilt, it can't go to Houston. The competition is about artists and not paid professionals.

Up until now computerized quilting was not allowed in the same competition as hand guided. This year at Paducah there will be a new category for computerized quilts.

The #1 thing Marilyn could see as a problem when she judged was the machine tension on the quilts. She was also surprised at how many still had markings left on.

Yellow Bird had 3 wins in 2006

Marilyn used to be able to do the longarm quilting in 6 weeks. She likes to allow 3 months now so everything is done as well as possible.

The 2nd thing we should say after introducing our quilt, is to give credit to who quilted it. "It's not a quilt until it's quilted." she said.

Marilyn and Claudia use a lot of paints in their designs.

Big Bird Blues won 4 awards in 2008 and 2009.

All of their quilts have been around to multiple shows.

Examples of Marilyn's amazing quilting. She is now a consultant for APQS.

Dragon's Breath won Best Longarm AQS Des Moines 2008

Claudia Clark Myers has just released a new book "A Passion For Piecing".

It made us feel better when Marilyn acknowledged she has made many mistakes on her quilts, and has developed techniques for covering them up. One time they tried new paints. When the paint would not dry and they had to set up fans around the quilt for 2 weeks before it could be sent.

She has unpicked stitches on every award winning quilt, one time spending 3 days straight just to unpick.

We can see Marilyn works for perfection.

Thank you Marilyn for sharing talents with our guild!