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ABOUT SAQA
 Inspired to Quilt: Creative Experiments in Art Quilt Imagery by Melanie Testa (Interweave Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59668-096-8, $24.95, 136 pages)
Need to get your creative juices flowing? Spend some time in Melanie's world - journaling, experimenting, and playing with your ideas and materials. Includes a good overview with step-by-step directions of dyeing, printing, soy wax resist, and painting on fabric. The strength of this book is Melanie's explanation of how to use your journal of ideas and to put all the techniques together to create a work of art. She explains and demonstrates how she uses her signature technique of layers of sheers to create layers of design, and how a single image pulled from her journal can be used in a multitude of different designs. I found this section fascinating, as I've always thought of using images as "one and done." Melanie mines each image for a variety of uses. Instructions on how to use quilting and embellishment to highlight elements of your design, several small projects, and a gallery fill the last section of this book. Inspiring!
 Clare Plug: Look South (Hawkes Bay Museum & Art Gallery, Napier, New Zealand, 2009, ISBN 978-0-473-14879-9, $20)
"Look South" is an exhibition of Clare Plug's work at the Hawkes Bay Museum & Art Gallery in Napier, New Zealand. The works in the exhibition are the result of three years of new work following a artist residency in Antarctica. Three essays explore different aspects of the exhibition. Lucy Hammonds (Curator of Design Collections at Hawkes Bay Museum & Art Gallery) describes Clare's artistic pathway and how the Antarctic residency affected her work. Douglas Lloyd Jenkins (Director of Hawkes Bay Museum & Art Gallery) describes the history of the Robert Scott expedition to the South Pole and the importance of flags and textiles to the expedition and how that affected Clare in her response to the Antarctic environment. Ursula Ryan (Information Advisor, Antarctica New Zealand) looks at the Heroic Era and its periods of exploration and how the artifacts from that time affected Clare's work. A fascinating body of work and a fascinating catalog.
 Photo-Inspired Art Quilts: From Composition to Finished Piece by Leni Levenson Wiener, (Krause Publications, 2009, ISBN 978-0-89689-804-2, $29.99 includes DVD hosted by Nancy Zieman, 128 pages, list of resources, index)
Not only will this book inspire art quilts, it will inspire you. Leni shows clearly how to evaluate your own photos to find interesting ideas for art quilts, how to use cropping to eliminate extra visual information, and how to combine several photos to create a stronger composition. Digital cameras allow us to capture so many wonderful images, but they're not all great art quilt candidates. Being able to follow Leni's thought processes as she evaluates different photos and combines them to create a strong composition is extremely helpful. Good instruction in art quilt construction and thread painting shows the reader how to translate the photo collage into fabrics. Especially valuable is the section on creating faces.
 Art Quilts at Play by Jane Davila and Elin Waterston
C&T Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-1-57120-530-8
$29.95, 112 pages, participating artist bios, resource list
I really like the emphasis on play in this book. Too often I go into my studio and feel that I have to create something that's "Art" with a capital A. I reject idea after idea as "not worthy" and end up accomplishing very little. When I remind myself that it's okay to play, my artwork is much freer and actually better. If you're looking for ideas and techniques to jumpstart your play date with your studio, this is a great source of inspiration. There are basic instructions for dyeing, printing, screenprinting, and discharge, as well as how to use paint stiks, fusibles, gel medium, foiling and other fun extras. The last part of the book lists various group play activities - challenges, collaborations, and online groups - ways to take your play and stretch your horizons. Playing is tremendous fun!
 Picture Quilts by Ed Larson
self-published, 2009
$35.00, 56 pages, Introduction by the artist.
Images and descriptions of 49 of the artist's works from 1975 through 2006. Larson's work is done in a folk-art style with lots of humor and wonderful details. His work is unusual in that he creates the art quilt designs, but other artists do the applique and quilting. For many of the earliest works, the quilter is unknown. "Daniel Boone Fights a Bear" (1978) was chosen as one of the 100 Best Quilts of the 20th Century. Eight of his recent works were featured in the recent "Houston Patchwork Politics" show. It's wonderful to see so much of his art in one place.
 Color Mastery by Maria Peagler
ISBN: 978-0-9816277-0-0, 112 pages, $26.95
Maria Peagler's "Color Mastery" is a helpful addition to any quilter's library. We all struggle with color choices in designing our quilts, and this book provides a wealth of helpful advice on how to make your fabrics' colors work for you. Maria's best advice is to keep a color journal to record color combinations that appeal to you and then to use color theory to analyze why you like them. Her recommendation to audition swatches of potential fabrics is also a life saver - it's so much better to sacrifice a few small pieces of fabric to discover that the colors aren't working together than to wait until you've cut out all the pieces. I especially liked the explanations of which parts of standard color theory only work for paints where the colors are mixed together and which parts are important for designing with fabric.
Maria is teaching her color mastery techniques as a pre-conference workshop at the SAQA Conference in Athens, Ohio May 18-20. You can sign up here:
http://www.saqa.com/newsebulletins/Conf09.aspx
 Think Like an Artist DVD by Pamela Allen
6-28524-00010-0, Running Time: 120 minutes, $29.95
It's fascinating to watch Pamela Allen create a still-life art quilt in front of the camera. Unlike some DVD's where the project is planned ahead of time, this is clearly an artist working through visual problems as you watch: how to create enough contrast between foreground and background, which elements should be added to make the composition pop, feeling free to discard pieces that aren't working. It includes sections where Pamela explains her approach to creating a stash (she doesn't; she depends on a minimal collection of fabrics culled from the local thrift store); on embellishments (Pamela never met an embellishment she didn't like - if she can figure out how to attach it, it's fair game); and on technical tools (I want a laser level like hers to help with squaring my quilts!) This is not a how-to - this is a rare peek over the shoulder of a working artist.
Special features: Trunk Show, Photographic Retrospective, Outtakes - you've got to see Pamela saying, "RIIIIIIGHT"!
 Contemporary QuiltArt Association: 20th Anniversary
ISBN-13: 978-0-9798939-0-2, 216 pages, full color, $30.00
This book is a showcase of more than 200 art quilts from five recent Contemporary QuiltArt Association (CQA) exhibitions in the Pacific Northwest. CQA members are all from the state of Washington and many are also SAQA members. While I enjoyed all of the work shown in this book, I was particularly taken by the works in "Visual Verse", a series of collaborations between pairs of CQA member quilt artists and non-CQA poets. Seeing the interplay between poetry and quilt art was very interesting. Some collaborations were fairly literal, some interpretive, and some were two different takes on a theme. Particularly moving were a series of three poem-art quilt pairs (Margaret Chula-Cathy Erickson) dealing with aspects of the Japanese American internment camps experience.
 Dream Landscapes: Artful Quilts with Fast-Piece Applique
by Rose Hughes, That Patchwork Place, 2008, ISBN 978-1-56477-859-8, $26.95, 96 pages, Patterns, Gallery, List of resources, Bibliography.
Rose Hughes creates wonderful color-drenched landscapes filled with sinuous curves and circles. Since fabric is woven in a grid, it tends to resist attempts to make it curve gracefully, but Rose shows you how to create beautiful curves using her fast-piece applique methods. By stacking the fabrics, sewing the desired curve, cutting away the top selvedge and securing the seam under a couched yarn, even the most extreme curves come out flat and luscious. Rose provides patterns and clear step-by-step instructions for several quilts, as well as a strong section on creating your own designs. Her own work is liberally featured throughout the book, and it's a real treat to see it all in one place. A Student Gallery rounds out the book, providing examples of how others have used this technique to great effect.
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