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The Quilt Alliance has opened registration for its 10th annual quilt contest. This year's theme is "Playing Favorites" and we encourage entrants to work deep inside their comfort zone, their happy place. To enter, make a 16" by 16" wall quilt showcasing your very favorite pattern or technique. Whether it's double wedding ring or hexies, crazy quilting, textile art or modern, make your quilt about whatever you love most in quilting right now. We're interested in documenting the state of quilting in 2016 - let your favorites be included.
For full information and registration, visit quiltalliancecontest.org/. Finished quilts must be mailed to the Quilt Alliance office in Asheville, North Carolina with a postmark no later than May 1, 2016. A special prize will be awarded for the guild with the most members who make an individual quilt for this contest. All entrants from that guild will receive a thank you gift from Moda Fabrics.
The mission of the nonprofit Alliance is to document, preserve and share the stories of all types of quilters and every sort of quilt. The Alliance's oral history projects, Q.S.O.S. and Go Tell It! have recorded more than 1,200 stories of today's quiltmakers and continue to archive and present the cultural heritage of quilting in America.
The 2016 Quilt Alliance contest welcomes every style and technique, and it provides quilters a unique opportunity to become part of one of the finest online archives of quilts in the world, The Quilt Index.
The Quilt Index is an exemplary online archive of more than 75,000 quilts from museums, state documentation projects and private collections, including quilts from four centuries. In addition, every quilt made for a Quilt Alliance contest is archived here. The Quilt Index is a partner project of the Quilt Alliance; Michigan State University Museum; and MSU's MATRIX Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences. Both the images of contest quilts and the quilters' statements about their quilts become a permanent part of the Index.
Past Alliance contest quilts now documented in The Quilt Index, left to right: Pineapple Log Cabin Renewed (2014) by Jane Hall, Ode to Tamar (2009) by Allison Ann Aller, and Cover Us (2006) by Yvonne Porcella.
Once again, the Alliance is proud to announce that professional judges will select the Handi Quilter Grand Prize. The lucky winner will have their choice of either a HQ Sweet Sixteen sit-down longarm machine package or a HQ Simply Sixteen and Little Foot package from Handi Quilter, Inc.
 Brenda Groelz, Director of Marketing and Education for the company says "At Handi Quilter, we give quilters the tools to make quilts that last, and we applaud the mission of the Quilt Alliance to save the stories as well as the quilts. This contest allows quilters to further the Alliance mission, while also allowing quilters the opportunity to place their own work in the important Quilt Index archive."
Additional contest prizes contributed by these generous sponsors:
As in previous years, the contest quilts will tour the country to various quilt shows like Original Sewing & Quilt Expo, corporate exhibition spaces like the one at Handi Quilter, Inc., and events like Quilters Take Manhattan, before being auctioned off on eBay to benefit the Quilt Alliance. All quilts will be labeled using StoryPatches, which include a QR code to link the quilt to its Quilt Index record.
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