 Postcards from faraway places can remind us of some place we've been or perhaps like to go to. Members of Art Quilt Main have taken a theme and turned it into 16 quilts in an exhibition at the Portland Public Library called Postcards from Away. Tom talked with Challenge Coordinator, Rana O'Connor, about the quilts, which take us from our own backyard to the other side of the world. Rana, thanks for joining us today here at the library to look at this wonderful exhibit of quilts. Before we get into the exhibit itself, could you tell us a little about the organization that made this possible, the Main Arts Quilt? Sure. It's the chapter of the Main State Guild for quilting called Art Quilt Main. Our chapter pulls members from all over the state and our mission is to promote quilting as an art form. So those quilters who really are stepping beyond the bounds of tradition and traditional quilts are welcome to come and experiment and see what they can do with turning their quilts from bed quilts to wall quilts and artwork. This year the theme is Postcards from Away and depicting postcards from places either real or imaginary that you either have been to or wished you could go to. And we thought, oh, you know, I wonder if those places where we had the quilts last year would be interested in having them back again. And lo and behold, they were very excited to have it back. So we have five venues set up for this year so far in Waterville, in Skahigan, in Soco, here at the Portland Public Library. And in the Portland Public Library we're actually standing in the children's area, the children's library area, where last year you had an exhibit on children's books. But this year it's on postcards. Could you talk a little bit about what this exhibit is about this year? Right. So this year, as I said, we threw out the challenge to create a quilt, create a postcard depicting a place either real or imaginary that you wished you could be or have actually visited. And so the members took that challenge and interpreted it in a variety of different ways. And as you get a chance to look at some of these quilts you'll see that they're from places as far away as the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and as close as somebody's backyard. So they came up with a variety of ideas, some are actual places, depict landscapes, others. I interpreted the theme to do like a bulletin board of many postcards which gave those people a chance to do a lot of mixed media kind of work and do a number of little pieces on a bulletin board rather than one big postcard. The only restriction that we put on the work for the artist this year was that all the quilts should be similar in size, depicting the 20 by 30 which is sort of a 4 by 6 postcard size enlarged, large enough to work on. Looking around at some of these postcards or quilts, it's amazing that they are actually quilts. Can you just go over briefly what constitutes a quilt according to quilters? Yeah, so I think generally quilts are fiber art, so you want to have some kind of fabric involved, thread, often batting. So most quilts are three layers of backing, batting and a top layer held together with thread or some other kind of means of holding them together. I think that's as basic as you get and then with art quilts there's a multitude of ways that the artist can embellish that top layer and create the top layer. One of them that really strikes me is this one of the water and the rocks that's sort of right behind us. There seems to be a lot done and the other one with race cars is with stitching which is really interesting. Could you talk a little bit about how those quilts kind of are made? Right, so that stitching is called thread painting often and for instance the one with the rocks is Sarah's quilt. She printed a photograph onto fabric and then took out her sewing machine and different colored threads and began to embellish the rocks and the water and gave it some life. In the other one, the race car, Watkins Glen, she took a photograph again but really intensely used threads to almost like a pen and ink to create shadows and realism. So it's really a neat piece, almost like needlework. It is really amazing and there are 16 of these and those are just two but all of them are really very interesting to look at. We don't have enough time to talk about each one but if people wanted more information about this exhibit where it's going to be, how could they find out more information? Well the children's library here has some information so I think that people can get some information here if they wanted to come to the library and pick up a card. They printed a card that has some information about it and get a chance to see the quilts obviously. And then I suppose they could contact me and I can give them a list of where it's going to be. That's Rana O'Connor and my email address is roconnor at main.rr.com so that would be one way. Okay, great. Well thank you very much for joining us. Alright, thank you.