Barbara Heins on Challenge (event)

Barbara Heins on Challenge (event)

Shaelagh Cull

Barbara Heins

Malting Tower at the Tett Centre

So we started a guild challenge, trying to think it would have been in the early 90s, that I had this idea that other organizations often have a competition, but people don't want to go about entering, if they have to enter through a written venue or something like that. So I thought, well, what if we have one right here. And it's been fabulous, because it gets people trying to make things using the same topic. And yet, you see a wide range of things. So we come up with an idea, this year, it's bags. So then what we do is we often have a program talking about bags or whatever the topic is just to get people inspired about it. So normally, they have about, nine months. So often, we announced it in the fall. And then the challenge is usually judged in May, things have changed because of COVID. We had to move things around this year. And so during that time, you know, we'll remind people at meetings that the date is coming up, and you don't need to enter ahead of time. So on the night of the judging people bring in their items anonymously, so that their name isn't on it. And then we ask them to provide some information with their entries. So what was their inspiration? What were the materials they use, what was the technique they used, and then it's judged. And over the years, the judging has evolved as well. So at first, we thought it would be nice to have outside people come just to get feedback from other people. So we had fibre artists and artists, different people coming in and do the judging. So they will judge it during the time we have our meeting. And by the end of the meeting, the winners are announced and the pieces are critiqued. But the trouble with outside people, if they're not weavers, or spinners, they can critique the artistic design, but not how well it was actually executed. And so for the last few years, we've gone back to having members judge it under a series of topics. So we give the topics, the criteria in the fall. So it might be best overall, or it might be best use of color. So people know ahead of time, how they will be judged. Things changed with COVID, because we had to do it all online and through pictures, and it was not quite the same. So we're hoping that in September, we'll actually be here in person for the judging. I should also mention that the prizes are donated by guild members who have little businesses, so they will donate yarn or fibre or other spinning and weaving related things. So we've had a wide variety of topics over the years too. Sometimes there are small things, sometimes they're big things and three years ago, the topic was embellishment, and we did have a guild member who's a quilter weave a piece and then quilt it into a larger wall hanging and so that was pretty memorable for sure.