TAFA mapping the world

I have been a member of the TAFA-list for a few years now (here is a link to my TAFA-profile), and when Rachel Biel mentioned that she was preparing a blog post on maps I notified her of one of my recently finished quilts in the series text messages. I love maps, looking at maps (including mind traveling), and we have old prints of maps and geographical subjects on our living room wall.

on top: an old print of Ratzeburg, the place where my parents met and I spent
my childhood summers visiting my grandparents;
below, left: Weilheim, where my husband grew up; and right: of the area where
my husband I got married.

If you want to surprise me and do me a favor, you can get a pretty or detailed map of one of my favorite places, or any interesting place in the world and I will be very happy!

That blog post on the TAFA-list was a little while in the making after Rachel had made the first announcement, but it is up now, and shows a number of interesting quilts and textile works on the topic of maps.
Here is a small photo of my quilt that  is featured on the TAFA-blog:

Promised Land 2015? (text messages 9)

At that point when I offered Rachel that quilt to be included in the post, I had, I think, not realized that I was already working on another quilt that would apply to the map topic as well. It was made for an article in the magazine Patchwork Professional, where I am demonstrating how my snow-dyed fabrics can be used in traditional and art quilts. The article should be out any day now, but as long as it has not been published, I will post a full picture on the blog yet. A detail, however, is well in order, I think:

Mapping the World of My Mind, detail

It is a combination of two pieces of snow-dyed fabric, and was quilted on the longarm machine.

Time flies.

A few weeks ago I saw Rachel Biel’s post on the TAFA-Forum for members in response to her friend A. Abdul Wardak’s poem on time. Rachel wrote something about trying to balance out everything by keeping a notebook, getting rid of clutter, and focussing.

Through these posts I was reminded of my former life as an academic - to be more precise, a linguist - and the research I was conducting at that time, on usage of the English word ‘time’. It was a large post-doctoral study in which I looked at more than 150,000 instances of the word and the context it appeared in, all of these instances taken from ‘real life data’. (They call that a ‘corpus-based study’ and it was all in vogue at that time.) I left my position at the university for personal reasons before I had completed that study, and decided I was going to something else in my life, so I can’t give you a concise presentation of the all-over final results it might have yielded had I just held out long enough. But I did find out a few things about the word ‘time’.

Please note: I did not find out the real solution to many people’s problem(s) with time as such, of which St. Augustine supposedly said that he knew exactly what it was as long as he wasn’t asked to talk about it. It was not a study on time management.

Anyway – the English noun ‘time’ is very frequently used in combination with a verb, and much more frequently so than in a phrase such as “the time is right to...” or “on time” or even “at that time” (which I have used above). The most frequent combinations in which ‘time’ appears (linguists call that a collocation) are the verbs spend, waste, take and have. In that order of frequency. So we talk or write a lot about how we “spend a lot of time doing this and that”, or that we “can’t spend a whole lot of time on...”. We are very much afraid to “waste much time”, or we “don’t have enough time to...”. And we are concerned with the fact that things “take (up) too much time”. We try to save time wherever possible. (I had not started looking at that collocation when I left, but I had written the four chapters on the most frequent collocations.) And we try to manage time. I wasn’t planning to look at that last combination in particular in my study, in fact, I don’t remember it appearing noticeably frequently in my data – perhaps due to the fact that the corpus I used had been assembled in the eighties and early-to-mid-nineties and the real obsession with time management came only afterwards?

These combinations tell us a lot of things about how we perceive time – it is a commodity, it has value, it is an asset. At least the western world’s thinking is strongly characterized by this conceptual metaphor (see  Metaphors we live by by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) of time as an important commodity that can be dealt with in earnest, very similar to money. Many of the contexts I found in my corpus were negative, either explicitly negating the verb (“I don’t have enough time to…”), or in meaning (“I’m spending a whole lot of time these days…”). We do not have a positive relationship with time.

Which is why we end up writing lists of all the things we have to do “by that point in time”, try to learn how to arrive at perfect self- or time-management. And still there never seems to be just enough of it to get all the things done that we would like to do or have to do. And never is there enough time to not do anything at all. (Which is the only reason why it has taken me several weeks to put all this into writing and share it here.)

Having done all this research, of course, does not guarantee that I am not prone to having periods when I fall into that trap myself. But I do tell myself to remember these results, and it does give me incentive to at least try and change my thinking about it all. We do have a lot of time – our entire life-span. Of course, we don’t know how much that is in terms of years, i.e. amount.

But what really counts is the quality we give it. One big help in this thing might be humor – linguists put it like this: “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”

And perhaps this approach by Amber Kane  is a good first step into the right direction.

A Love-Hate-Relationship

Actually, you can delete the item ‚love’ in the heading, at least from my side... I have taken several trips to the customs offices this year already. One in May on the occasion that my quilt “Illuminated” was returned to me early, taken out of the show “Beyond Comfort” after some crew had managed to lose the plug and adapter. I had to prove that it was mine indeed, that it had not been out of the country for longer than three years, and then I was questioned on why I had not had export papers done when I sent it in the first place. I did not have to pay taxes or fine or customs, though. But they told me I should make sure I got export papers from them the next time I sent a quilt to non-EU countries. At that point, I told them that I would be expecting a second quilt from this same exhibition later on.

In August, I had bought a few printing stencils and a necklace made from old glass beads via the TAFA-List, which were sent without a proof of purchase or value. In order to retrieve this I had to go to customs twice because they would not accept my paperwork the first time, and I had to bring proof of the actual amount of payment. I had to pay slightly over 12 euros VAT on this occasion. (Not to mention the gas money for two trips.)

Today I went to retrieve that second quilt from Beyond Comfort, “Yellow Line”, which again had been caught.

My husband has already asked me who this boyfriend is at the customs office...

To be correct  – by now I know them all, the guys who work there. One is friendly ok, he is the one who took care of me and "Illuminated" earlier this year. One is efficient, strict, and correct, but not necessarily assuming you are trying to cheat him personally by millions of dollars when importing three printing stencils and a glass-bead-necklace, he took care of me and my little items on my second trip in one day in August. The third one, however, is small, very young compared to the other two, hyper-adhering to rules and regulations, and definitely trying to give everybody who has to come there a hard time. He took care of me on my first trip in August, and I had the bad luck of hitting onto him again today. The friendly one was present, too, but did not interfere in the process after they had agreed which one of them was going ‘to do her’ (except for sending me an eye-rolling look behind his colleague’s back when he was giving me a hard time). I brought all the same papers as I did when negotiating release of "Illuminated", thinking that that would be sufficient, after all, it had worked once. This included a catalogue from the exhibition, a print-out of the email telling me when to send the quilt so that it would arrive in the States on time, and my proof of identity. I also repeated the story from May, and stated that this was the second quilt I had mentioned then and that I did again not have export papers...

At first he questioned my explanation about a quilt going to an exhibition – but his colleague remembered me from May and spoke on my behalf. Then he questioned the validity of the e-mail message because it was sent such that the curator’s name appeared in the sender and the recipient’s space as she had bcc’ed it correctly to prevent every artist in the exhibition getting everybody else’s mail addresses. Then he said this didn’t prove anything at all about the time the quilt had been out of the country (it explicitly stated that the show premiered in August 2011 in Birmingham). What was the worth of the item? Why had I not got export papers?

I felt almost as badly as approx. 25 years ago when I was trying to enter the US in Dallas with an open return ticket – on that occasion I was retained by immigration for over an hour, questioning me because they thought I would go and catch myself an American husband. My parents were waiting outside and getting worried whether I had actually been on the plane.

Actually, I think the customs officer today didn’t know enough English to completely understand the content of the e-mail message, but I held back my offer of translating it for him, telling myself to not let this get out of hand. Finally, he graciously agreed to treat the packages as a ‘gift’, but warned me yet again about the export papers. And that next time he would be the one to estimate the worth of the item and that it would then be taxed accordingly. Again I bit my tongue and did not ask how much he would have estimated the item in question today...

Just how could I manage to not have to deal with this particular guy anymore? I certainly don't know enough about this kind of psychological warfare that these people have been trained in.

Surface Design Association

After I had received the invitation to join the TAFA-list last fall I finally decided to do something I had been meaning to do for quite a while: I joined SDA, the Surface Design Association.

I had heard a lot of praise about their journal, and as my decision to join SAQA a little more than two years ago definitely had a boosting effect on my work, I thought “who knows, might happen here, too”.

Now, so far I would definitely not consider myself an accomplished “surface designer”. I am a good hand-quilter, though sometimes struggling to adapt hand-quilting to modern design quilts. I am working on my machine quilting. I still haven’t done any screen-printing (though I am planning to, once Ste. Marie is over). So far, I do a little bit of additional stitching beyond quilting, and am planning to do a lot more of that.

Shapes 3  (2012), detail.
Surface design is slowly showing up in my work...

I have only theoretically done any folding or pleating or manipulating of fabric (though, again, I am planning to for the future). But good things take time.

When I received the first copy of SDA’s journal I was thrilled to see all the interesting things reported on. And when I had finished reading, I felt humbled. Indeed, I am still pretty far from being an accomplished surface designer. But one can learn, and that I intend to do.

New site for TAFA-List goes online

Some time last fall I received an e-mail by a to me unknown person, Rachel Biel from Rayela Art, telling me that she had found my website and asking me whether I wanted to become a member of the Textile And Fiber Art List (TAFA). At first I hesitated, but after a few days I checked it out, got in touch with Rachel and finally decided to give it a go. I jumped over my own shadow, got myself a Paypal-account (which I needed to pay for the fee, and which Rachel rightly suggested I should have if I was trying to go more international with my hand-dyed fabrics) and signed up.

Because Rachel was in the midst of having the newly designed site set up, I decided that I would only take advantage of the lower price for signing up  before it went online, but that I would wait with uploading my profile until the new site was about to be launched. That took a bit longer than she had anticipated, so we received several mails informing us about progress and delays of the site, and what Rachel wanted it to do, and how she hoped it would not get too complicated for non-computer-freaks to manage their own profile. Just after New Year’s she then was looking for guinea-pigs to start uploading their profiles, which I could unfortunately not be part of, because we were out of town visiting friends. Then it took still a few days longer, but it finally happened this week.

So in preparation for the big launch I spent part of past weekend preparing and uploading images, trying out what I wanted to say about myself and my fabric business, and my art business. I wondered whether perhaps I should have taken two memberships, one for justquilts.de and one for justcolours.de, but then I decided for the beginning it was ok the way it was right now. After all, the two are somehow related, so it wouldn’t matter to have them appear together on my profile. Although my membership officially is listed as “justcolours.de”. 

Now it’s up there, and you can check the whole site out here.

One of the things I immediately fell in love with is the members map feature. When you look at it, all the little balloons show you where a TAFA member is located. So when you have a particular affinity for a specific country, such as New Zealand (as I do), you can look at the map, see who’s there, click on the balloon, and (virtually) meet new and interesting people. (As you probably have noted, I have included that world-map-gadget at the bottom of my blog-site, which tells me from where people have looked at my blog. I’m so thrilled to see Brazil, Far Eastern Russia, included on that map. Of course, here I won’t be able to find out who’s behind those red dots, but it’s fun to have them on the map anyway.)

But let’s get back to TAFA – I also spent quite a while surfing the list and discovered many interesting things. Take a look – I’m sure you will enjoy it, too!