A Surprise Win!!

Back in April, I showed a small quilt I worked on with five other quilters, Time for Tea. You can see my post at this link  with photos taken prior to completion of the binding.  On Wednesday, I got a call from Alice from the group who went to the reception for participants at the Quilt Alliance offices in Asheville - our little quilt took the grand prize in the contest! Here's the little quilt, photographed by the Alliance:

Time for Tea

You can see all 90 quilts in the competition on the Flickr page with some detail shots here - http://www.flickr.com/photos/quiltalliance/with/9107565271/ 
When you get to the five-sided (house-shaped) quilts, those are from a prior contest.  All the quilts also currently show up on the Quilt Alliance website here - http://www.allianceforamericanquilts.org/

The three judges for this contest are very well-known in the current quilting world: Mark Lipinski, Paula Nadelstern and Marianne Fons.  Mark Lipinski has a radio podcast, and called Alice to talk with her about the quilt.  He proclaimed using the Hot Cross Buns to portray the 20 theme was brilliant, and that the quilt was amazing. They were impressed that we did a slice quilt at this scale (20x20 inches).

For our grand prize, we won a HandiQuilter Sweet Sixteen, which is a mid-sized machine designed for quilting. With my full-size longarm (23 compared to 16 inches), I don't need the machine, and some of the other quilters have been moving and downsizing, so they won't want to keep it at their homes. We have not yet decided what to do with the prize, but winning a prize was not the point anyway.  The quilts will be shown and eventually will wind up for auction on Ebay as a fund raiser for the Quilt Alliance.

Alice also mentioned that the photo of our winner will be printed on tote bags, and I'll get one of them.  Now that's a cool prize!