Sunday 17 May 2009

Thames Valley Contemporary Quilt Group

Yesterday was the second meeting of the newly formed Thames Valley Contemporary Quilt group. It really turned out to be an informative and stimulating day. And that was even with the dilemma of tripping the fuse with hair dryers and irons running!

In the morning we had a Focused Show and Tell. Each person had brought something she had made early in her career...or in some cases, when very small. The focus was to either make connections or talk about how the art journey had developed. It was interesting to see how often the journey had gone full circle.

Joanna O'Neill then presented concepts about giving talks to groups. Drawing from her experiences of talking about her felting and discharge work, she spoke about what to and not to do, how to make connections and overcome the unexpected. The ideas presented were great for helping me think ahead for possibilities of doing something like this. I saw others taking notes as well.


We also had an excellent hands on demo session. The members were divided into 3 groups and rotated around 3 demonstrators.

Ros Crouch demostrated her methods of manipulating photos for Paint Shop Pro. Whether you had done much of this sort of thing or were new at it, we all came away with excellent ideas to play with ourselves.

Merete Hawkins showed us how she makes buttons from Polymer Clay. Merete sometimes uses the buttons for abstract representations in a landscape. For instance, she had a postcard sized landscape but the cows in the field were represented by black and white buttons!
Here is a photo of the work from one of the participants. We took our buttons home to bake later.
Penny Armitage demonstrated her explorations of painting on fusibles. Not just painting on Bondaweb type fabrics, but also on fusible interfacing.Penny's samplesSamples of the work of one of the participants.

Everyone seemed to go away with a real buzz about the day. We are looking forward to the next one on 19 September when Margaret Ramsey will talk about blogging and Judy Fairless, who recently stepped down as co-ordinator for the British Quilt Guild - Contemporary Group, will present design development and using sketchbooks.

1 comment:

Amy in Austin said...

Wow! Looks like fun!