Hi all.
So, I’ve been kinda quiet since returning from Quilt Market. Some of that has been physical recovery; Market takes a heck of a lot out of me. And some of it has been due to a frenetic scramble to follow up on all of the awesome things to happen at Market. As always Market provided more awesome than I could have hoped for…
I’m also getting ready to really start talking about Savanna Bop. Things are falling in place and coming together. Just waiting for everything to get back from Market so I can get going on final photography. So excited to share it all, and to get into why Savanna Bop even exists…
Speaking of sharing, I do have some exciting news that I can share at last: I’m going to be speaking at QuiltCon!!!
If you don’t know what QuiltCon, it is a modern quilting conference put together by the Modern Quilt Guild. The inaugural QuiltCon will be next February in Austin, TX. The list of speakers and teachers is simply extraordinary and I feel profoundly honored to have been asked.
I’ll be talking about Modernism (and a bit of Postmodernism) in art and how it related to, makes sense of, and can expand modern quilting. Basically I’m going to be looking at how Modern Art came to be and why, contextualizing the formal development. In short, it’s gonna be all about Why Modernism?
You see, I’m all about what things mean. Of course I love what things look like, but I always want to know what something means. That’s why I love the quilting tradition. I look at the great 19th century patterns and see a wealth of symbolic activity, of meaning making. That’s one of my real hopes for the Modern Quilts movement, to have it generate profoundly meaningful quilts that both reflect and transcend their day. I tend to have lofty goals.
Anyway, now I have to work on how to cram everything into two 50-minute talks without having them become ponderous. Oh dear god, how I am I going to get from the advent of popular photography to Abstract Expressionism in fifty minutes?!?!?! Thank goodness I have until February…
In the meantime there are a gazillion quilts to me, so it’s time to get back to work…
Yay quilts!!!
-T
