Acid Trip wins a ribbon!

Begun April 2021, my Acid Trip quilt started as an experiment in string piecing, and morphed into an abstract expression of what I, a non-drug-user, think an acid trip might be like.  It was... a journey! 

Here are all the posts in chronological order:
April 27, 2021 - String Piecing
June 1, 2021 - Coming along
September 10, 2021 - Ideas for layout
October 27, 2022 - Done!
November 22, 2022 - Labeling
March 25, 2023 - this post

Along the way, you'd think I'd have used up all my scraps, but no such thing!  I still have lots of little pieces of fabric to play with.

FINISHING

After almost two years of work on the top, I wasn't about to let it down by attempting to quilt it myself on my home machine.  I don't enjoy the quilting part that much anyway, and this quilt is special.  So I paid a professional long-armer to do custom quilting.  The expense was totally worth it!  Nancy Stovall of Just Quilting selected a series of X and O medallions with crop-circle-esque swirls and lines, and co-ordinated them with the X's and O's that the pattern naturally makes.  We chose orange thread and a black backing fabric. Just look at these closeups I took as I was doing the fold-over binding:

Groovy.

Fold-over binding is my favorite because it's so neat and not bulky.

Then I held off on shipping it to my brother, because I wanted to put it in a show, first! 

Northwest Quilters' Festival of Quilts - 2023

The Northwest Quilters' annual show, the Festival of Quilts, was held in Hillsboro Oregon on March 10th and 11th, this year.  Acid Trip was my first entry in any quilt show, and my only entry in this one.  On the 11th, I went to the show to see all the art, and methodically paced up and down every aisle, appreciating every quilt (so many beautiful ones!) until I saw mine... at the very end of my path! 

I spy with my little eye...

And what's that thing hanging off it, under the name tag? 

a C-PTSD moment

I want to say I was super stoked and ran around pushing people into bushes while whooping with delight, but I tend to check myself in situations like this and let my pleasure release a little at a time.  I don't know how to explain it; I think I've always been this way.  For other people, I can feel unrestrained delight, but not for myself. 

Once, when we were kids, my sister got the violin she'd been begging for.  As we left the music store with her new rental (kids don't get permanent violins until they reach full size), we walked to the car and she was skipping a little, and I heard her saying "Yes! Yes! Yes!" like she couldn't hold it in.  I distinctly thought "I wouldn't do that, because then people would know how happy I am, and what if things go wrong?  Then they'd know I was disappointed."  On other occasions in my childhood, I can recall being excited, hiding my excitement, then being disappointed and thinking "See!  I was right not to look happy."  One time, my grandmother broke a plan she'd made with me, and when I complained to my mom, my mom said "Well, she didn't think you'd mind, because you didn't seem like you were looking forward to it", and then I felt burdened to not show my disappointment, because it might make my grandmother feel bad.  But I'd previously felt like I had to hide my excitement, for the same reason! 

Believe me, I'm now aware that this isn't healthy thinking, and I'm working on it.  The best I can figure right now is that it was a consequence of nonexistent emotional boundaries.  I took on too many of other people's emotions, both to feel and to manage, and this combination of empathy and trying to manage other people's feelings for them was so tiring that I couldn't bear to add my own feelings to the mix.  I assumed that my feelings would become an emotional weight on others, as their emotions weighed on me.  And if feeling disappointed was bad/stupid/heavy, it was better not to feel too excited or happy.  (Ironically, tamping down positive emotions doesn't lessen the intensity of the negative ones.  Emotions aren't on a shared dimmer switch!  The more you suppress the good, the worse seem the bad.) 

So this stuff lingers.  Here's how I reacted to the ribbon.  I saw my quilt in the distance and bee-lined for it to see how it hung.  Then I saw the ribbon pinned to it, and immediately turned away to look at someone else's quilt while I processed the existence of the ribbon.  I didn't feel excited or happy just yet.  I was just rearranging my reality to include a ribbon.  Then I looked again, and saw it said "Third Place".  I looked at the whole quilt, read the tag with the quilt description, and then read the ribbon more closely to see what category it was judged in.  Then I wandered around, came back, got a few pictures, and found my friend and quilting mentor. 

"Guess what?" I said, all nonchalantly mischievous.  I showed my friend the picture with the ribbon, and she reacted like a happy puppy!  She hugged me, grabbed my hand, and dragged me from booth to booth where she knew the venders, demanding that I "SHOW THEM!!!"  Honestly, I began to be a little more excited then, but I can't be sure if they were my feelings or hers.  (That's the boundary thing.  I'm working on it!) 

Happiness unfurled a bit more the next day, when I texted the pictures to a few people.  I knew the quilt was good.  I'm glad I put it in the show.  Now past the danger of surprise, I could take more pleasure in it.  And when I got the quilt back from the guild the next week, and hung the ribbon in my room, the good feelings unfurled the rest of the way, so I can now be pleased and proud.