16″ diameter
Commercial cotton fabric, cotton batting, thrifted bedsheet, metallic thread, wooden frame, personal data, machine pieced into patchwork, digital longarm quilted and stretched over frame
Y’all know I love data, but I’m not much for Top Nine. Instead, this one goes out to the people who have told me that sharing about rejections helps.
Here, in quilt form, is my acceptance and rejection data from 2023. Green represents acceptances, but notice there are two shades of green: lighter for juried and darker for non-juried. Pink is rejections, and purple are things still undetermined (cough*Paducah*cough).
Excluding the non-juried shows, which accept all works until a given deadline or a space cap, I had about a 50% success rate this year.
I knew I wanted to stretch this on a frame (with my new electric stapler recommended by @kellyspell ) and I was just going to quilt it with a pretty circular block pattern, but as I was browsing designs I came across this one from @karleeporterdesign and knew it was the right fit.
You are enough. Put your stuff out there. 50% > 0%. As my dad used to say, we have a 0% success rate for 100% of the things we don’t apply for. And I want to see what you make in 2024.