Today at 10:15 a.m. my IQA World of Beauty entry packet arrived in Houston (Zephirine Drouhin). It took me most of last Friday to get it all ready. First were the forms to fill out, then I had to retake the photos because I couldn’t find the hi-res ones I took for Road to California, and I didn’t like the ones I took last week. I actually ended up doing not one, but three separate photo shoots for Houston because the camera angle made my quilt un-square, one of the edges was curling up, etc. Eventually though, I had a CD worthy for jurors’ eyes.

Next came getting a suitable 4×6 print to include with the entry. I had to go back, count em, five times to three different photo processing shops. The first one I e-mailed, actually ahead of time. My DH had the membership card so he had to pick it up from the counter for me. Two of the quilt’s edges were cut off. The rules state “full view” so I couldn’t send that one in, and I couldn’t send my DH back in anyway to have it redone, so the next day I brought my memory stick to photo processor #2 to use the photo maker kiosk. Of course it was broken.

The next day (Friday) after finishing the rest of my submission package, I took my memory stick to processor #3. The photo maker couldn’t read it because the jpeg was in a folder, or so I thought. I brought it home and took it out of the folder. Back at processor #3, the machine still couldn’t read it. By now, time was really running out, but I was determined to finish it off that day, so I went back home and got online to e-mail the image in, only I couldn’t download the uploading software. Waiting on hold for tech support, I figured out on my own that the site was incompatible with Firefox, but it worked just fine with IE.

One hour later, back at processor #3 I go to pick up my photo. Ice cream girl comes over but can’t find my order anywhere, so she calls photo girl over. Photo girl looks in all the same places ice cream girl looked, but no photo anywhere. Finally she looks in the e-mail and there it was, still not printed. So she burns a CD and takes it over to the photo maker and prints it out there. Well, I could have certainly done that myself and saved an hour. I thought at least they would use the real photo printing machine. It was oversaturated to say the least, so not as “color correct” as I would have liked, but at least there was no color shift and all the quilt’s edges were there.

It’s funny, as the entry process became increasingly troublesome, I became more determined to finish the job. I made it to the post office at 4:20 p.m. with a complete package, ten minutes before closing time. Wow! Did it ever feel good to get that entry off my hands. I certainly could have waited until Monday to mail it, but I probably would have ruined my weekend with worry. As it was I had a great weekend, lots of fun, and lots of quilt designing too! Stay tuned because I’m going to finally have stuff to show you later this week, as well as an update on the manuscript.