ST. PAUL — The First Lutheran Ladies’ Aid’s “Chain of Lakes” quilt is hanging in the State Fair exhibition hall, straight at all four corners and under lighting that has been described by its makers as adequate, harsh, flattering, questionable and “fine if you stand over here.”

Seven women made the quilt over the winter and spring, working on a frame in the First Lutheran basement beginning in January. The piece was selected at the Pine County Fair for State Fair exhibition after taking the county’s champion quilt award.

It is not being judged again. It is simply hanging, which should have reduced the tension around the trip.

It did not.

Irene Bergum measured the visible drop from the left corner by eye. Donna Skoglund checked the entry card. Mildred Haugen stood twenty feet back. Eunice Dahlquist pointed out that the one rust-colored block is supposed to be there and that anybody who asks whether they ran out of blue “has understood neither the quilt nor northern Minnesota.”

The seven stitched the Chain’s lakes into a field of blue-green stars with shoreline blocks between them. The rust block represents the brief week each fall when the map goes orange. The group estimates the piece took about four hundred collective hours, though Bergum said the number is approximate because “nobody clocked coffee.”

Fair-board chair Verna Tho, one of the makers, said the State Fair display matters because the county selection is the only step most open-class entries can take beyond home.

“A quilt doesn’t become more quilt because it is in St. Paul,” Tho said. “But the women who made it get to stand there and see strangers stop.”

Several did. During the forty-three minutes the Misquah group watched, at least sixteen people paused long enough to read the card and five leaned closer to examine the hand quilting. One woman pointed to Big Pelican and traced the stitched shoreline with a finger without touching the fabric.

“That was enough for me,” Haugen said.

The seven took one photograph in which nobody was looking in the same direction, then walked for coffee and found that the State Fair had continued charging State Fair prices in their absence.

The quilt remains on display through Labor Day. It will return to First Lutheran next week, where the Ladies’ Aid has not yet decided whether to hang it permanently or put it back into use.

Eunice’s position is that quilts are for using.

The committee has not voted.