freezing through may...

I was really pleased to see that my donation to this year's SAQA Benefit Auction was included in the post listing good reasons to donate to the cause a couple of weeks ago.
That was during the first week of May when our round of family celebrations uses up a lot of energy. At least the weather was acceptable on the day we celebrated my son's birthday.

Apart from that weather has been very cool for May, which is supposed to be "pre summer". We're still wearing our winter clothes, although I have taken out of storage and ironed all the summer things. We can't go sailing either, for one thing, because our little boat needs the usual refurbishing after a few years, and it was too cold to put on the paint after the old layer was taken off, but also because we would be freezing on deck,

The now-11-year-old is also heavily hormone ridden these days and the mother starts wondering why she ever wanted to have children to begin with. I knew it wouldn't be fun and easy all the time, but it's really getting to be much harder right now than I thought it would. Hasn't been much fun lately!
So moments at the sewing machine are too few, but well appreciated when they happen. I am still working on my entry for the competition in Alsace, and when I woke up this morning I think I had the idea for a solution for the problems which I, of course, have encountered (and they are a different kind of problems than I was expecting).

backside view 

I  am not going to talk about the details of these problems, but they will need some radical steps to be solved. Which I now have to take, and that takes courage!
And I am seriously thinking about whether I will ever enter this challenge again (after I finish this quilt). I am not superstitious, but something is not working right in this direction. Strange - it was such an interesting experience to be on the jury for it...

A difficult „Personality“

I have written before about a quilt which I had started after Christmas and had almost ruined at one point.   It had been inspired by one of my sons’a drawings which he had given me with the words “Here, Mom, you can make a quilt from this!” That was more than a year ago, and although I really like(d) the drawing, inspiration was slow to come. At first it went well, but after a while I had to put it aside for a while, knowing it needed more work, but being unable to come up with the solution just then.

At the end of April I pulled it back out when I realized I might be able to finish two quilts until the final entry date for „Tangle“, this year’s challenge at Ste. Marie-aux-Mines. But then I ran into another dead end after I had added on a piece and put in more lines. That's when I thought I had ruined it completely.

Only a friend’s encouragement saved this top from being abandoned completely. I turned the top once more – back to its original orientation, according to my son’s drawing, in fact.

And from there things developed quickly. Before I had returned home from my friend’s place I knew how I would quilt the thing, and quilting went quickly, too. But after quilting, it had a huge bulge which would not budge, no matter how much I tried.

Well, it had already gone through so many different stages of hope and despair that it really didn’t matter anymore. Radical solutions often work best. Trying to figure out where I could cut out a triangular shape, eliminating the bulge and highlighting it with noticeable stitches did not lead anywhere convincing. My husband, who has by now taken on a position of quilt advisor with frequently unusual suggestions, said: “You’ll have to cut it through all the way.” So that’s what I did – a diagonal cut all the way. Knowing full well that it would not make it any easier to present it as a whole piece, or to keep it within the size restrictions. I constructed connectors between the two parts, had to come up with a solution to keep the piece with the wider lower base from rolling up, had to do double the work regarding facings and tunnels (and I always do tunnels at top and at bottom anyway)...

"Personality", 2011, 100 x 100 cm

All of this with considerable time pressure at work. Registration closed while I was going to be away in Switzerland, so everything had to be finished, photographed, sent off before I left. Virtually during the last minutes before my departure I completed the registration form, and in that muddle forgot what title I had given the quilt, registered it under a wrong title, and sent the thing off after I had set off, trying to find a mailbox on the way. Which wasn’t easy, they don’t have a whole lot of mailboxes along the Autobahn! A couple of days later my husband sent me a text message that an envelope with an address in France had been returned because of insufficient postage, but he had taken care of it and sent it off again. At that point I was definitely ready to give up. But I did receive a mail about charging my credit card with the registration fee, so the registration must have arrived on time.

Yes, I did register two quilts. The other one had been a piece of cake - although hand-pieced, it all went smoothly, no problems, and I definitely thought that one would be a set candidate. The difficult one, with its correct title “Personality”, is the one which got chosen and will be on display later this week in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines.