David and I have spent our week working on our presentation for our upcoming talk at the Village Quilters guild on May 10th. David and I work on our ideas and speaking topics separately. We bounce our ideas off each other in order to narrow down the topics that we want to cover. We do a lot of adding and editing as we go. Each of us have our own 3 x 5 cards. We put down what we think are the important points to each quilt and then practice talking about each piece. Having another artist to critique our ideas and individual presentation is very helpful. David has indicated several things that I should mention on some of my pieces. I need to remember that not only are we covering how we work together in our studio, but also the techniques we use for the pieces being discussed. David and I are working on not only our speaking points, but also the order and the quilts we will be sharing. Trying to decide which quilts will be displayed during the whole engagement and which quilts will be shown individually as we speak about them is very difficult. It is very interesting looking at our pieces with an eye towards dissecting them down to their design components and reason for creation. Some of these pieces were not displayed in our home. We keep them stored away from dust and light. Seeing them in a group is really fun. I can really see where my favorite and most successful techniques develop. We are auditioning our quilts on our photographer's stand to decide which quilts view best from a distance. We are also deciding which ones look best together. | We will spend the week rehearsing our topics and then on Saturday we plan to do a final run through with our final sequence of shared quilts. That gives us a week to work out any bugs or timing issues. We are speaking for about one hour and feel we have more than enough quilts to fill the time. |

This is the photographers stand I purchased when I was first involved with Quilt San Diego (now Visions Art Museum). This is a great item to have. I use my stand for taking photographs of my quilts. We will be taking ours to help display some of our pieces.
If you are interested in one, Google backdrop stand and a variety of priced options are available. They can be purchased with or without the backdrop paper. I purchased a neutral gray fabric to make my backdrop.