Mojo?

It had been a while since I had been visited by the quilting mojo. That is certainly partly due to the fact that working and studying full time requires a different kind of time management, and there is a family, too, that asks for and needs to be given attention, and household chores and and and... Amongst all that it is difficult to find time to even start giving though to quilting ideas, and then those need to brew, but when too many things are going on that kind of silent simmering can't go on because the burner gets pushced too far into the back corner. No oxygen will get to it there.
Another factor that influences this situation, however, I attribute to the fact that my recent quilts had got to be rather political in their statements about refugees, human rights, etc. Although I feel very strongly about these issues, and these messages - and I would never want to miss the quilts that emerged from that - the political situation here has become so frustrating and disappointing that I might wonder what use there is in stitching messages like that on textiles. Twice within a year hopes for improvements in politics after an election were thwarted. Pre-election promises were null and void after the election, or, worse, the coalition that would have been necessary to initiate changes did not happen. So my personal frustration has grown tremendously, my political messages would now get too complicated or too outspoken. No use putting that on textiles, as it contradicts my own definition of how a viewer should be able to see a piece of art, or perceive a message. Namely: not too blatantly. The viewer must be able to fill a piece of art with a meaning that might be very different from my own, I must not run around with a flagpole and drive my intention into their heads with force and without alternative.
So similarly as at the point when I made number XXXIX in the Play of Lines series and when the line designs had become too difficult and complicated, my series text messages might be either at its end, or it must find a reorientation of which I don't know at the moment where it will go. If it ever comes.
But I was happily scrapping away. On all levels. A bit of scrappy sewing on the side while my workshop students did not need me.

Small scale Underground Railroad blocks from leftovers from my
hand-dyed fabrics.

Knitting socks with partly leftover yarns...

... and knitting a blanket with the smallest left-overs from sock knitting that won't last far
in socks even.

On a more serious side, I was trying to make something for a wonderful inspirational challenge by Claire Passmore with the 12 by the Dozen group, when she set Shamia Hassani as the inspiration for the February reveal. But as I stated on their blog - I had an idea, I came up with a bit of a design, and then time failed me and it has not been executed yet. (It might, in a larger scale than the 40 x 40 cm, but that will have to wait.) And I was struggling with a piece I had been invited to for a joint German - South Korean exhibition on the condition of partitioned countries. When I first received the inviation I was thrilled - it is a life story of mine, with a family that was split up East and West, a grandfather who fled from the Russian occupied zone in the early fifties, to be reunited with his wife and two of the three daughters after the East German uprising in 1953. But the topic turned out very personal, I could not get going. So I labored, thought I would do something with 'Germany' as a layover and an inset spiral from Germany's flag colors or so and put the two different layers together, and then the outlines of the country over it in reflecting fabric. (Now that I write it here, it is sooo obvious that there would have been too many layers of meaning, but at that point I did not see that.)

This would have been the ground area of Germany, representing
the partition of forty years.

Left over from an exercise in a Nancy Crow workshop long
ago, a piece in red and black could easily be turned into a
German colors piece by adding some 'golden' yellow.

All of it hard going, and not very convincing to myself even. How was this going to turn into a good quilt? Then I had put the spiral-to-be part together and was going to send a photo to Kathy Loomis and realized that the fabric that was supposed to be the inset spiral really looked like a flag by itself, at least a bit.

I chucked the spiral idea and for the first time in a long while had a bit of exhilaration about my quilting. Even would have preferred to stay home and work on it rather than going to my studies, but that was not possible.
I cut the outlines. That was relatively easy.

But this thing, cut from a flat piece of reflecting fabric, is everything but flat when you are trying to put it onto another flat piece of fabric.

It rather misbehaves and I am making a fool of myself as I am working on attaching these two to each other. Process is slow, and time is running fast. But it feels good to have something going on in that mojo part of working with textiles. We will see where it goes.