The first thing one notices upon entering Joan Dawson’s Mays Pond home is the number of quilts hanging on the walls.

There are large ones and small ones, of different colors and different patterns, all of them made by Dawson during the last 15 years. A bunch of them are even stacked in a wooden armoire in the living room.

“They’re all over the place,” she said. “Probably around a hundred of them. It’s hard to tell.”

But one of her quilts isn’t at her home. It’s called “Diamonds In Bloom” and is currently in Paducah, Ky. for this year’s American Quilter’s Society Quilt Show and Contest. It measures 69 inches wide by 75 inches long and is based on a pattern by Sara Nephew for her upcoming book. The show runs from April 20-23.

Dawson’s quilt is one of 410 in the annual competition. It was chosen from an initial field of 852 quilts. If her quilt is chosen best of show, she’ll receive a $20,000 cash prize. The show has $100,000 in total prize money.

“I don’t do a lot of showing,” Dawson said. “I enjoy the process of making them. Showing them somewhere is not terribly important.”

Dawson, however, has won awards for her quilts. Her quilt, “Kansas City Inspiration,” which is based on patterns that appeared in the Kansas City Star newspaper in the 1920s, won the grand championship at a 2003 show in Puyallup.

She is also a member of an organization called QA – Quilter’s Anonymous, a group of approximately 400 members who meet in Lynnwood.

“There’s nothing nicer on a rainy day than sewing and making something,” Dawson said.

Currently, Dawson says she’s got approximately 30 quilts in various stages of completion. “Every quilter has several projects going on at once,” she says with a laugh.

Quilting is one of Dawson’s two passions. Her other is training and showing dogs, and her love of dogs shows in her living room, where pictures of dogs share space with quilts.

For years she’s shown poodles, and still has her two retired show dogs, Molly and Kate. But her new focus is training and showing Luca, a year-old sociable and playful Papillon.

“I think he’s got it in him,” Dawson said.