Further Thoughts on Judging

Heya there Smites, coming to you with a quick one from the hotel at Sydney Airport!

Our flight is 6am tomorrow morning and as we live over an hour from the airport we decided to spare ourselves the 2am wake up. Off to Paris tomorrow morning, where we meet up with Oscar - he's been swanning about Greece, London and Copenhagen for the past 4 weeks with his girlfriend, having a whale of a time. We will meet up with my friend Flo (​yep, the one I wrote the post about a few weeks back), and have a lot of fun! And then I'm off to The Netherlands to teach again for my lovely friends Wietske and Herman in Den Bosch.

Last week when I was talking about judging, I mentioned about the judging being blind - that is, that at the Sydney Quilt Show, the judges don't know who made each quilt. I personally think thats really important - it means the judges can't award their friends, or their students a prize knowingly. It also means that they can't NOT award someone a prize for some personal reason or other, or because they think a particular well known quilter should have produced something or higher standard, as an example. It means the judges and the guild cant be accused of bias for or against, and that each quilt is judged on its own merits.

There's been a LOT of complaining about this in recent years. Times past it didn't matter at all, in fact QuiltNSW didn't even have it in the rules because the quilts being entered in the show weren't all over social media. And there's the problem.

If you are a quilter then highly likely you follow other quilters on social media. And you will see their quilts. And then when that quilt is in front of you on a judging table, you know exactly who made that quilt, and when, and where and everything else that they posted about it as they made it. Makes it very hard to be impartial.

In this day and age lots of quilters keep their followers entertained by posting what they're working on. I do this myself to a certain extent, although I learned a long time ago to keep what I'm working on fairly under wraps until its finished, because I have some imitators who like to "design" and release quilts unbelievably similar to mine, and I like to stay out in front of them. That's another matter though.  We all live our lives so much online these days, and so people don't like being told that they can't post about a quilt they're making and then put it in the show.

It's an issue for me, because I very frequently enter my latest Block of the Month quilt in the show, as its usually the quilt I've just finished. Those quilts earn their existence through social media exposure, because that's one of the major ways I promote my BOM programs. So if I don't post about my quilt, I have no income - and if I do, I broke the rules. 

This is where its pretty cloudy and the people getting cranky about the rules need to calm down a bit - I have never once been asked to withdraw my quilt because its been on the socials, and I don't know of anyone else who has either. So it's a polite request rather than a hard and fast exclusion.  I've said I don't like the rule publicly online in the past, and I've also voiced it to the committee on several occasions.

BUT. Having just judged the show, I'm seeing it in a slightly different light. I think if you know you're making a quilt to enter in a show, keeping it off social media is a good idea. Someone said to me online last week that for heavens sake, SURELY I can recognise some of the more well known quilters quilts when I saw them, and knew who made them? And yes, there were a fair few I was fairly sure who did make them. But on several counts I WAS WRONG. Someone entirely different made those quilts, and more to the point the quilt I chose as my Judges Choice quilt I had NO idea who made it, and I was so surprised when I found out who did, because its so unlike her usual quilts.

Someone also said to me last week that judges should stay off social media if its that important and they know they're going to judge a show. That's just ridiculous. People sometimes take a year or more to make a special quilt. And I would hazard that 99%  of quilt show judges are professional quilters, making some or all of their income from their quilts, teaching, pattern writing and designing. It's not even remotely feasible for judges to remove themselves for months or a year at a time on the off chance that they might glimpse something on someone else's feed that they decide 6 months later to enter in the show.

I'd love to know what you think? There's a lot of quilters out there with veeery strong opinions on this matter one way or another. At the moment I feel like I'm falling somewhere in between. Let me know in the comments!

Right I'm off to Bedfordshire, its an early start and a long day. I'll see what I can find for you in Paris.

Happy stitching

Sarah x