Sunday, September 28, 2014

September Meeting Recap

I'm embarrassed I don't have more photographs to show from Caro's fabulous lecture on photographing your quilts but I was too busy hanging on her every word to actually take pictures.

A few of Caro's tips for taking better photos:

  • Take lots of photos.
  • Try different angles, move your quilt around, add props.
  • Be ruthless in your editing.
  • Try to shoot in natural light.  Cloudy days are best or try an area of open shade.
  • Use a reflector and diffusers to control your light.
  • Using a tripod will make it easier to get a straight, steady shot of your quilt.
When taking photographs of your quilts for show, Caro suggests you shoot your quilt flat with no feet or fingers in the shot.  You can pin on a hanging sleeve to hang your quilt while taking photographs.  You can also pin a weighted sleeve to the bottom of your quilt to prevent that all-too-common windblown look, and help your quilt hang straight.  

As an added bonus, if you are entering a quilt in QuiltCon, Caro has generously offered to photograph quilts at our November meeting.  Contact Caro directly at splityarn@gmail.com for more information.

A huge thank you to Fabric Place Basement for once again hosting us in style.  We are so excited to now be meeting in our new home.  :-)


Announcements:

Quilts for Boston Update:  We have 22 more Quilts for Boston and are scheduling our final delivery.  If you still have a quilt please contact alice@alidiza.com immediately.  We want to make sure all quilts are included in our final delivery.

We Need You!  We are looking for volunteers to help with a variety of initiatives including organizing a guild "yard" sale for the November meeting, organizing Charity quilt projects for 2015, hosting sew-ins, and photographing and blogging about our monthly meetings.  If you are interested,  please contact Rebecca at rebecca.s.loren@gmail.com.  Have a great idea for the guild you'd like to run with, we'd love to hear about that also!

September marks our new membership year.  To be compliant with the MQG we must align our membership year to the calendar year and move our start date to January 1st.  Our 2015 membership will be $60 and run from January 1, 2015 - December 31, 2015.  To accommodate this change we are currently offering two membership options:  Join through December 31st 2014 for $20 or Join through December 31st, 2015 for a discounted rate of $75.  Click on the Membership tab for more information and to join now.

Stay tuned, show & tell from our September meeting is coming soon!

Thursday, September 4, 2014

September Meeting with the Fabulous Caro Sheridan of SplitYarn

My eye! With me! At Quiltcon!
Don't Blink @ QuiltCon courtesy of SplitYarn
We have another amazing speaker lined up for our September meeting.  The fabulous Caro Sheridan will be speaking on How to Photograph Your Quilts.  Caro is best known in the quilting world for her fun pop culture quilts including Don't Blink which won 3rd place at QuiltCon AND appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Product shoot today means a shop update soon! (Tuesday, noon ET)
Photo courtesy of SplitYarn
Caro also applies her amazing creativity to knitting, embroidery, photography, and running SplitYarn, an online shop to sell her hip project bags and pouches.  She is the author of Knitting it Old School (available at Fabric Place Basement) and has a project in Knit to Flatter.  She currently has two classes available on Craftsy: Shoot It!: A Product Photography Primer and Pictures to Pixel Quilts.

Bender graffiti mini quilt
Bender Graffiti Mini courtesy of SplitYarn
The meeting will be held from 1-3 on Saturday, September 20th at our new home, Fabric Place Basement. As always we'll have show and tell so don't forget to bring your latest finish, WiP, or anything else you'd like to share. We LOVE to see what you've been up to:-) Snacks and guests are always welcome!