Big Winners at Oregon Coastal Quilters Show

After two days of judging in Newport, the winners have been selected. With the show opening, I can announce who these talented quilters are.

I love guilds like this one that have two “best ofs” with one for wall hanging and one for bed-size. It’s challenging for small quilts to compete against large given the inherent greater complexity large quilts display, and it’s always great to have more awards and spread them around.

Oregon Coastal Quilters has a great group of volunteers. I have now judged for them four times. They are always so organized and professional.

We evaluated 169 quilts with four wearables among them.

Best of Show–Bed won by Cindy McEntee and called Cirque de Rose. Cindy is a Judy Niemeyer Certified Instructor and has previous best of show awards, deservedly so. Love her color choices in this quilt. As you can see the quilt is so large, even with tall people holding it up, they couldn’t get it up off of the floor.

Best of Show–Wall called “Roots and Branches” was won by Christina McCann who is a national award winning quilter with this particular quilt. She achieved amazing texture through her fabric choices not to mention the glowing colors.

I awarded judge’s choice to “Big Sexy” by Jennifer Reinhart, who happens to be the person who contacted me to judge for the guild for their first judged show. She is also an outstanding quilter who quilts for many of her fellow quilters. Such creativity in the use of the large-scale animal print within this pattern. I also admire the complementary color scheme, the great workmanship and outstanding quilting technique.

Oregon Coastal Quilters honors the maker of the best hand-quilted quilt with an award called the Golden Needle. This year the winner is Paulette Stenberg. There were several Hawaiian quilts in the show, but Paulette’s stood above the rest and was the only one echo-quilted every quarter inch. To really showcase her quilting, she used a darker blue thread that stood out on the pale blue background.

Here’s Paulette describing to me how she began quilting one-half inch apart but took it out, because she thought it would look better closer together.