SNaP - SAQA Regional Group

Studio Art Quilt Associates is a national group that promotes the art quilt, and has regional groups throughout the country that usually encompass neighboring states.  The regional groups, in turn, have "pods", narrowing down the geography so that members can meet in person.  The Northern Virginia pod, known as "SNaP", meets on the 4th Saturday of the month.  Some meetings feature a member as the "spotlight", others might involve a field trip to a museum.  The July meeting last Saturday featured Lisa Ellis as the spotlight speaker.   Lisa is an art quilter who teaches on the national level, and is also past president of the national SAQA group, as well as director of Sacred Threads, a biennial quilt exhibition with themes of spirituality, healing, joy, peace, inspiration and grief.  She shared a series of quilts she has been working on based on the cathedral window.

Lisa was inspired by some traditional cathedral window quilts made by her grandmother to explore this technique and develop a machine method for creating the traditionally hand sewn windows. 

"Radiance" was made using this method; it debuted at Houston International Quilt Festival in 2016.

"Midnight Blooms" was also shown at IQF in 2016.

"Windows for Yvonne" was made for an exhibit honoring Yvonne Porcella, founder of SAQA, who passed away a few years ago.  This one was made in colors favored by Yvonne and also using her trademark checkerboard fabric.  You can see more of Lisa's quilts on her website; she did share 2 quilts from this series that will appear in Houston this year.

In addition to the spotlight speaker, we also revealed some challenge quilts based on the theme "maker's mark".  The idea was to make a 12" square quilt based on how you make your mark on fabric, whether that be through dyeing/printing your fabric, a particular style you have developed, machine and/or hand stitching, or any other interpretation of mark making.  Seven participants shared their challenge quilts.

Most involved hand stitching as part of the mark making process.  Other techniques include screen printing, leaf pounding, crazy quilting, digitized stitching, embroidery. In the picture above, can you guess which one is Sue's?  If you are a follower of this blog and our thermofax screen business, it shouldn't be too hard!

This one didn't fit in the group photo.  It includes some pieces from a leaf pounding workshop prior to the June meeting.  The next group challenge is due at the end of September and is to be inspired by Gustav Klimt, an Austrian painter of the Vienna Secession movement who was greatly influenced by Japanese art.  Hmmm...time to put the thinking cap on.