Lesson Learned on Original Art

I wanted to share this lesson from my original entry into the 2009 Quilting Arts Calender contest. I spent many hours creating this piece. The sky is hand painted with Setacolor paints, the tree leaves are a doily my mom crocheted, the branches and trunk are painted warm and natural, the sign post is thread painted, the grass is an old sweater of my daughters, the fence is the top from a pair of my granddaughters socks and the house is a piece of needlepoint I did from a kit over 30 years ago and never finished.

All sounds well and good until I showed this to my friend Suzanne who is also a fiber artist. She asked if I had though about the rules of the competition that said the piece must be original art. Also was the issue of copyrite with the needlepoint. Of course I had not considered either of these but took this photo and emailed it to QA for their opinion. The piece was disqualified because the needlepoint was from a kit and not original artwork. So my lesson is read all rules of any competition carefully and be extra careful about using anything in your art (even if it is over 30 years old) that may bring up copyrite questions.