Threads of Innovation

 Last week was the SAQA conference, Threads of Innovation. It was held locally for me, so I drove over to San Jose for two out of the four days. It was very well run and well worth the time and money. We even got swag bags, with some Misty Fuse and fat quarters.

I attended two break-out seminars, one on photographing quilts which was very useful. All kinds of great advice which I'll put to use the next time I'm trying to get my work photographed well enough to enter a show.

The second was about doing art on your iPad by Susie Monday. It was all about using your photos, even photos of your own work, and putting them through various art apps to make them into art. Or into fabric designs to get printed out on spoonflower, etc.  Very interesting, I'd used several of the apps she talked about, but it was the combining of them that I hadn't considered before. It was fun to see the examples of her work and her students in the presentation. And I liked that she had some examples of printed fabrics to see.

While in the class I noticed the ceiling and took a picture of the grid with the light and shadows.

And then I used an app to manipulate the photo. Maybe I should add this to my proposed series of shadows quilts?

I wish I'd taken pictures with some of the people I met, but I was so engaged with talking to people I'd only ever known online so I neglected to do that.

We had great talks on Friday from Pokey Bolton - on the rise and fall of publishing and Lisa Congdon on using Instagram. The next day there were presentations from RoCoCo an art collaboration, very interesting out-of-the-box kind of stuff. Social Justice Sewing Academy gave a wonderful and moving presentation, including some of the quilt makers telling about their experiences of making their first quilts through the program.

The last thing is the picture above, three views on critique, Susan Else, Judith Content, and Delores Miller each took their turns critiquing SAQA member's work. Very useful to see this in action, and to get the participants to repeat what they heard from the critique.