Hello, I'm Deanna Springer live at the Great Wisconsin Quilt
Show with insights to this year's event. I'm joined by
Melissa mason for her Modern Motion special quilt exhibit.
Melissa, welcome. be here.
>> Your quilts are beautiful. Thank you. We need to talk about
several of them. >> Okay.
a special exhibit. Exhibit going on? I do all weekend long, and
you're also teaching. I am, let's talk about what's your
lecture is about. >> Yeah. So I'm teaching and
lecturing. I'm lecturing. One of the things I like to talk to
quilters about is finding stories. I love how we get
inspired by other people's patterns and creations. And then
I also love when we can take that a step further and put
ourselves into it and start taking those baby steps towards
becoming our own designers. So in my lecture, I talk a little
bit about my own design inspiration, how I pull into my
own story, my family history, my cultural background, and think
about how that might inform my designs and the quilting that I
do. >> So the quilt we're looking at
that has the white background. Tell us a little bit about that.
>> Yeah. So I talk about this in my lecture because as I talk
about looking into your past, pulling from your background, I
have a series of quilts that this is the first one of, and
it's inspired by the folklorico skirts that I used to dance in
when I was a little girl growing up on the border of Texas and
Mexico as a little Mexican American girl. And it's just
such a colorful, vibrant part of my childhood. I love the motion
and the flow of those skirts, and as a modern quilter, I
wanted to try and make that quilt in a more minimalist,
constrained way. So I just kind of added some geometric
elements, some bold colors, which is what I love using and
just really played with it from there.
next quilt next to that. Yeah. you can tell, I love color. And
I was given a challenge to basically use the entire rainbow
of a fabric line. And what I wanted to do was pay homage to
the cotton history, the quilting history of cotton, of kind of
the shape of that blossom playing with curves and color.
What does it mean to put these in motion and in conversation
with each other in a way that wasn't just kind of flat and
static? >> It has great motion, great
job. And the next piece, as you can tell, I love a rainbow.
>> So this one I was playing with the idea of a gradient,
which is something that I teach in my color theory class that
I'm teaching here this week, using a gradient to really pull
your eyes in. Now this one is cool because it's a beautiful,
clean quilt, but it comes from a little bit of an ugly story. So
years ago, when the California wildfires were raging, the smoke
settled in our little valley in northern Utah, and it was very
sad. The stories coming out of California. And at the same
time, in the evenings, we had the most beautiful, most
beautiful sunsets. >> Yeah.
Smoke Set. And it's kind of inspired by that idea that out
of out of tragedy, out of ugliness, we can get such
beauty. with the Canadian wildfire fires
coming down into South Central Wisconsin.
looking at those beautiful colors and then at nighttime,
the beautiful beauty was showing.
quilt behind us. >> I love this one. This one is
one of my favorites. It hangs in my office at home when it's not
on the road or in exhibits. This is called Sonder, and this
actually comes from exploring my own family history. It was a
passion of my grandfather's and something that we kind of shared
together. And as I sat down with him to talk about this history,
to learn his own history, it just occurred to me that
realization that every person around us is this complex
individual. Every person walking past us in this hall, all of
those tens of thousands of people that are here this week
have these complex stories. Take a look. Being able to celebrate
that. So yeah, so I really wanted to celebrate that. It's
called Sonder, which is a word that evokes that. It means that
kind of that realization of the complexity of each individual
person. And so with this, I wanted to play with a lot of
different colors and lines and also take it in unexpected ways
and, and sudden interruptions. I really wanted someone to look at
it and try and follow it and get a little bit confused.
>> Every quilt has a story. Exactly. And tell us the story
of how you started quilting. Melissa.
So I started quilting in a different way than most people.
I was living in Cairo, Egypt at the time, and I was also
pregnant with my oldest child, so I was nesting, so I needed to
be creating something, but I didn't know what to do. And one
day I stumbled upon the fabric market in Cairo, which is
Paradise. Wow. So imagine turning a corner and suddenly
it's a street where floor to sky is just bolts and bolts of
fabric, with these men climbing the bolts to find just the color
you need. I didn't know what to do with it, but I wanted it so I
started buying. I started by collecting fabric. Yes. And at
some point my husband was like, I'm going to bring you a sewing
machine. When I go back to the US this week. And so he brought
me a sewing machine in his carry on luggage, and I just watched
YouTube videos and tutorials and taught myself how to quilt some
>> But eventually I learned we all start somewhere, right?
>> We all start somewhere. >> Well, I think you're doing a
fine job. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful for you joining us.
Thanks for having me. We are at the Great Wisconsin Quilt Show.
It's our 20th anniversary. >> Congratulations. What a way
>> Thank you. And thank you all for tuning in. To learn more
about this year's event and next year's event, head over to Quilt
show.com.