I don't really like the idea of “competitions” in art, because there's nothing objective that you can compare. It's easy to tell if someone runs faster than someone else, but how can anyone say that one picture is “better” than another one?
All the same I've planned to enter a couple of embroidery and digitising competitions this year. It will be fun, it will be a challenge and maybe encourage me to try something different. And if I don't win I can always tell myself that competitions aren't important anyway! 🙂
One of the most interesting competitions I've seen advertised is the Pfaff Embroidery Challenge, for works made with home sewing and embroidery machines (http://www.pfaff.com/global/729.html) If you have a look at past winners of this competition you can see that the winning entries are a million miles away from the usual kind of machine embroidery that you see on most internet embroidery sites. They are genuine works of art rather than the usual embellishment designs. That's not to say that I like all of them – some, yes, but not others. But like them or not I have to admit that they stretch my ideas of what can be done with our home embroidery and sewing machines
Just to emphasize the importance Pfaff places on embroidery as art, they use painterly terms for the themes of their competitions. For example, the themes for the past two years have been “Still Life” and “Portrait Gallery”, while this year the theme is “Landscape: let us travel”
My usual subjects for design are animals, birds, fish and plants, so I'll definitely have to come up with a new approach for this one. I have two ideas in mind and have done a few preliminary sketches for them. When (if??) the projects are finished I'll post them here, but I'm too superstitious to talk much about them until they're finished!
Still waiting for you to post your project! It is really amazing and I can’t believe that they did not accept it into the competition.