Carrefour le 31ème...

 

Last week was completely dominated by the annual visit to Ste. Marie-aux-Mines for the European Patchwork Meeting/Carrefour. As it is now the location for premiering EQA's small size quilt challenges, and the location where EQA holds the AGM, the visit has become virtually unavoidable - in a good sense. It is familiar, I know the place, and it feels like almost coming home.
 

It was very depressing to see the empty fountains 
throughout the valley, though, and to learn that 
they had had a water crisis during the heat wave 
of the summer, with drinking water being transported in 
in lorries. Climate change for real experience.

 This year I gave myself permission to have a little fun beforehand, I revisited the Butterfly Garden in nearby Hunawihr on the day of my arrival. I had been there before,  seberal years ago, and as I had just read a book about butterflies I thought it was time to go back. I remembered some things slightly differently,  but it was still very nice to be in the midst of these fascinating creatures. 

 

 

On Wednesday I prepared the German contributions for hanging. And started counting various species of insects as depicted in the quilts. The idea for counting different species had occurred to me when out of the 45 German contributions we had two with a Praying Mantis. The total of those was 11. There were over 70 quilts with butterflies. 18 quilts with ants. 37 with Ladybirds/Ladybugs, 39 with grasshoppers. We didn't count the bugs overall, although I did notice there were many, perhaps that is a homework to be given to the Belgian guild which will be exhibiting the entire collection at their Quilting Event in October. I did notice - because I made one - that there were three Picasso bugs, however, a personal bias is always fascinated by similar things! 

 

The complete collection of Insects can be seen once again in 
Belgium October 7-11, details can be found 
@eqa_europeanquiltassociation on Instagram, or on 
https://www.belgiumquilt.be/nl/.

 
Then I proceeded to help hanging Barbara Lange 's exhibition with the wonderful title 'Embarrassing Mothers ', for which Barbara keeps finding new and interesting names, AND turns them into absolutely adorable quilts with a multitude of ideas. No way telling which are my favorites!

In the process of hanging... Barbara Lange and Gabi Fischer.

 
The German Patchwork Gilde 's Tradion bis Moderne was exhibited in Église Madeleine in the center of town, and I was happy when somebody showed me that my quilt had been used as the photo for the exhibition in the catalog. 

 
Four days of intensive work traveling to ALL of the exhibitions in the 17 different locations followed. I was especially happy to see Brenda Gael Smith's Forza Vitale  in Ste. Croix-aux-Mines, but was equally impressed with most of the other exhibitions as well.  
And again, very moved by the many ideas quilters come up with when using Guldusi embroideries for different topics. I had recently arrived at a state where I didn't have 'loose end' Guldusi embroideries hangout in my boxes because I had managed to use several in the 'Conversing with Earth' series for 20 Perspectives and in 'Seeing Red'. That status has now changed and been reversed. The challenge continues.

 

I won't go into detail about the other exhibitions, each of which had their own impressive characteristics. I can't do all of them justice here and suggest you check out @carrefour_patchwork on instagram for a complete overview. 

 
Needless to mention that it was fun to meet friends more or less unexpectedly, to have wonderful chance encounters with people whom I 'knew' but hadn't met in person yet, and just to be out and about in nice sunshine, and to eat a sufficient amount of Tartes flambées to tie me over for the year.

 

Allison James and Ildiko Polyak, two of the five 
(ex)members of 20 Perspectives that I happened 
to run into.We could have arranged a European Members Meeting... 

Looking forward to going back. And I am thinking about perhaps entering the contest next year. A vague idea is building.

I did it...

Imagine you get photos made of three quilts by a professional photographer to be able to enter these quilts in a pestigious show in Germany. Patchwork Gilde Deutschland has a tri-annual juried show called "Tradition bis Moderne" (From Tradition to Modern), I have been in it a couple of times, and I even have juried it once. I wanted to finish two quilts for this show which are both still pretty far from being finished, by at some point I realized I didn't need to fret about this. I could enter others. But I needed the professional photos. Fortunately, the photographer who used to take the photos of my quilts when I was still living in that small town to the north-east of Munich had agreed that I could send the quilts in a package, he would shoot the photos, ship the quilts back and send me the files digitally.

He did send. I did download. I remember that I did. But when I finally got around to "you need to get this entry in" and it was already getting relatively close to the deadline, I could for the life of me not find the files. No memory left of what names I had attached, hard disc searches were unsuccessful, even the digital native could not help. Fortunately I still had a tiny bit of leeway and I called the photographer the next mornign and asked him to send the files again, which he kindly did.

This time I managed to keep track of where I downloaded and saved the files, was organized enought to find out whether I had to downsize the pictures, had typed up artist statements that I could just copy-paste, and got my entry in more than 2 hours ahead of time.

The show takes only one quilt per entrant, but I figured it would increase my chances to try with the three pieces of entry allowed. Now we will have to see whether one of them makes the cut.

Here are the detail shots I included in the entry.

 

Detail from "Alchemy of Textiles"

 

Detail from "The Legendary Blue NuDenim"

Detail from "The Quilt that Sewed Itself"

 

 This Blog Entry, again, has been a long time in the making. I started to write it right after New Years', mildly proud that I had managed to get the application in. But as I am still juggling between two different computers and haven't figured out my saving system yet and am unable to let go of the photo editing software that is on the old one but can't tranfer to the new one... once I have written the text, somehow it registers as 'done', but of course the pictures need to be included, and as mentioned, something was amiss with these photos.

So by now it might even be time to receive news whether either of the three was accepted. I know only one will be shown if at all. I just hope at least one makes it, disappointment would be severe if all three fell through. But then, I have juried quilts out for this show. Fittingly, the next magazine's topic is 'Rejected!' and I wrote an article on #quiltconreject. We'll see whether I learned something from it. 

 

 

 

A sort of planned post from almost long ago: 'Exhibition is on'.

The yeat is 2023, and although Life 1.0 took a precedence over creativity for a while and about 1/17th of the year is over, i.e. we are already facing the next Christmas again... I still want to publish that post I had written about my exhibition in October. This is how far I had got, and I will not correct or add or alter anything just now:

 Saturday was the big day, the opening started at 10.30 a.m. I was touched by how many people came. The mayor was there and gave a speech, making it her personal matter to celebrate that two recipients of the city's 'Culture Prize' - the museum and I - had teamed up together like this. 

Here is my husband talking to the mayor.

A lot of interested people came, some friends, and it was a friendly and open atmosphere.

***

As I said - I won't alter or add... although it is by far not as developed as I had thought it was... I will just go on with life!

Because now two quilts that were shown in that exhibition have exciting things happening to them. 

One quilt has found a new home, and the new owner is so excited to have it displayed above the sofa in her living room.

Shapes 20 in its new location

And the other one has just been juried into the German Patchwork Gilde's prestigious exhibition "Tradition bis Moderne" and will be traveling to at least 8 different venues throughout the next two years, including a stop at EPM in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines in September.

Mellowed Yellow

I had entered two quilts to be juried, and this one was my 'I hope this one gets in!', so I am very happy about this success. Sewing these scraps grounded me during the first Corona lockdowns, while I was listening to 'Pale Rider', and now it has turned into a successful entry, it was a good start to the year.