Quilt Canada 2016

As I write this, Quilt Canada is 7 days away! It is crazy how fast it has come up and how exciting it will be! The Canadian Quilters' Association (CQA/ACC) hosts an annual conference each year so that quilters across the country and beyond can come and learn, have fun and buy cool stuff=)

I will be attending and giving 10 tours over the course of 4 days through the National Juried Show. The tours have sold out and I would be lying if I didn't say I was a bit nervous. Here is last year's show.

Our national conference hosts lectures, workshops, evening entertainment, a huge merchant mall and the National Juried Show or NJS for short. The NJS is my passion. It is a juried show in which you send pics of your quilts and they are seen before a jury to determine if they are worthy to hang with the best in Canada, then prior to the conference they are judged. Oh ya, and we have a 5 year judge program and use judges from that program to judge our NJS, we really are just that good!

Since 2005 I have been entering the NJS, I have got my fair share of rejection letters but that didn't stop me, I would just keep entering.  I love it that much. In 2014 I became Vice President of the organization so part of my job was to sit in with the judging of the NJS, and I had to do it again as President.  Don't get me wrong I wouldn't have traded that experience for the world, but it meant I had to wait 2 years before I could enter again.

In 2016 I entered, and got 2 quilts accepted! I am over the moon excited to see them hanging there.  Everything about the NJS is amazing, the jurying by experts, then if you get in or not... man those acceptance emails are the best! Then the quilts are judged and there is so much anticipation as to who won Best of Show and all the other categories. And you don't get to see the quilts beforehand, it is all so secret and mysterious.  Finally, all is told at the Awards Ceremony for the NJS entrants and sponsors.

Don't even get me started about the sponsors... they are simply out of this world. Yep, they are brands well known in the quilting world, but it is so much more than that.  They sponsor the awards because they care about Canadian quilting and want to promote it, just like we do.  And they go out of their way to help CQA/ACC.  

So this year, not only do I get to have two quilts in the show, but I get to emcee the NJS awards nite and be right there when all the winners are named, well I get to name all the winners!  Oh the excitement and suspense will be thrilling!  And then over the course of the conference I get to take people through the NJS and tell them all about the quilts and quilters and share how awesome the NJS is.   It really doesn't get much better than that!

If you want to see the quilts and everything that is happening at Quilt Canada, you can download the app 'Quilt Canada 2016'.  Here there is an activity stream that everyone will be posting tons of pics of quilts and fun times!
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