Opportunities

 

It seems as if the moment of my recent exhibition in Denmark was a bit of a push-factor in my so long lingering quilting mojo. First, of course, it was a very good feeling to see several of my quilts together “out in the open”, which hadn’t happened in almost three years. And second, somehow things are moving now.

I have several ideas for quilts that I want to enter in challenges, or that I need to make for the group challenge for “Voyage”. (I even had an idea for 20 Perspectives’ challenge Flowers, but am not following up on that as I am currently taking a sabbatical from the group challenges there.

 

This is not my idea, and I am not making a flower quilt, 
but it is a nice shot of my mother's sunflower heads 
that she is now saving for the birds to put out for them during winter.

)

Another interesting thing has happened as well. In August I met a friend from the town where we used to live until the fall of 2024, who has since changed position and is now the museum director in Dingolfing, Bavaria. This is a fairly rich town as a large car manufacturing company is located there, accordingly, the museum is not only scraping by. He told me about an upcoming outside exhibition next year by a group of descendants of former refugees, Germans who had been living in what is now Czech Republic and were displaced after the end of WWII, as happened to many Germans at that time. They had brought their every-day and celebratory costumes with them, although they soon stopped wearing them during every-day activities when they realized that this was not usual in the places where they had ended up. The group of approx.. 3,000 people dispersed around the world, but some pockets of them remained together, albeit at various places in Germany. They have since founded an archive where they preserve the traditional costumes, they have documented their form of German dialect as it was spoken, and they have participated in parades such as the traditional parade of ethnic and regional groups during Oktoberfest in Munich. Since the end of communist rule in Czechia contacts have been established between descendants of the former refugees and the people who are now living in the area from where they were displaced. And they have staged exhibitions to inform about their traditions and culture in various places. Dingolfing will be the next one.

My friend the director wanted to broaden their concept of exhibition, has invited a video artist, who is working on the topic of displacement and home – and while we were talking about this event, he bore the idea of including some of my quilts in it as well. Did I have more quilts on that topic than the one he owns? Would I be interested…? Things have been developing from there. Would I be interested in making a quilt out of fabrics from their collection?

Dr. Matthias Witzleb amongst a group of "Wischauer" women 
when their costumes and language compilation were named immaterial heritage last year.

 

Meanwhile, I have talked to one woman from the group, who herself was born in Czechia and was displaced with her family at age four. She will send me some of their history pieces and I will see how inspiration will strike me then, whether it will lead me onwards from the idea I have already brewing in my mind. I am thinking of a piece for the text messages series.

And just yesterday a new exhibition opportunity was developed between the local minister and me in northern Bavaria for late October next year. Things are moving!

No Café Leisure, anywhere…

 

Lace Museum in Plauen

I have recently returned to the place where I work in northern Germany after a 10-day-stay at my husband’s place in northern Bavaria.

It was hot and dry. I spent many hours at the sewing machine (thank you for electric ventilators!), working on a quilt that I want to enter for EQA’s juried exhibition at Abilmente in Vicenza in February. I had started on it the last time I was at my husband’s and was not sure how it would come along, but as I really didn’t have anything else to do it went quickly. Except for my typical situation when improv piecing with scraps, which usually gets me into awkward corners and angles that need to be filled out, things went smoothly and I now have a partly quilted piece that needs more hand-stitching and that I took with me when going back north. I might even be finished before the closing of the registration!

 

As I had a lot of time at my hands it would have been nice to go to a café somewhere, at some time, but the area is rather remote and does not carry a lot of infrastructure for amusement and well-being, so unless I had driven for more than 20 km there wasn’t really much option. It’s a pity – I have the feeling that, since the pandemic, unless you happen to live in one of the major cities, where they can still be found in abundance, cafés have undergone a kind of mass extinction process. And even if there is something where you can buy a coffee and perhaps a piece of cake, as in ‘the siting room at the bakery’, the nice and cozy kinds of cafés where a real person comes to the table and takes your order seem to have disappeared, and in the bakeries it is all self-service, nor does it add up to a nice and relaxing atmosphere. Perhaps I look in the wrong kind of places and this is only true for ‘out in the countryside’?

With all the time to concentrate on piecing, developing and pushing forward I also gave a bit of thought to what I want to be doing next. In less two weeks, I will have my exhibition at the Danish Patchwork AGM in Odense, and am really looking forward to that. I will be showing a selection of the text messages quilts mostly, depending on how much wall space I will really have. To be decided on the spot!

For a while I had been thinking about what I will do with myself and my currently rather limited time for quilting. I have decided to take a year-long-break from the 20 Perspectives group as I felt I needed to concentrate on making whatever caught my attention rather than working to a cue as given by the group. The piece I am currently working on is in fact one of these ideas, and it is relatively new. The happier I am that it came together so quickly. Of course, my inner critic is as always very strong and I am not sure whether it is really really good, but it’s been very good to work on it.

Another idea I have been harboring is now coming to the forefront, I have started sketching, and it is closely tied to my wondering ‘whereto from here’. I thought I might want to start a new series – but… fact is that I have never before consciously decided to ‘start a new series’ but always found myself (‘suddenly’) ‘in a series’ when I realized that a few pieces I had made where showing a common theme and developing the characteristics of a series. Then I could decide on a title.

My recent thoughts about perhaps doing a series involving some aspect of ‘legend’ were giving me a hard time. I could not come up with a decent title. I even asked the internet, and although suggestions were given, they still were not satisfying. I compared ‘legend’ with another literary genre, saga, and was surprised that the definition of ‘legend’ points out the focus should be somewhat religious. The legendary James Dean … a religious person? Well, perhaps he was being treated in a manner of religious reverie? It did not give me enough creative room to play, I felt. Motifs that were coming to mind were all centering around pictorial depiction, which has not been my focus of work before, and I don’t feel like going down that lane.

In any case, I finally decided that I would simply continue with my series text messages. There are so many options open yet. And, to be honest, the real reason why I thought I would have to close that series was that I lost count at some point. I am not quite sure how many text messages I have made, at what number I stopped knowing which number I was on, and I was embarrassed to admit this to myself. Not to mention publically.

By now I have tried to reconstruct a list from the blog. As it turns out, I have been pretty vague about the number one particular quilt would have in the series for a while. Even had a post about correcting the number I gave the piece that went to the SAQA Benefit Auction (and then became my most successful contribution so far).

But – should I not be able to fully correct it, I decided I can change the mode of numbering. I was pretty certain that I had not yet reached number 29. A prime number. I could simply number the following pieces with prime numbers and leave out the ordinary numbers in between. The current piece can easily be included in text messages, but it would have been difficult to find a title with ‘legend’ for what it is about.

Although I did not have a nice café to do the thinking, I am happy with the result. (Caveat – I was wrong about 29, as it seems I have made more text messages than that. But there are other prime numbers to be used.)

SAQA Benefit Auction starts tomorrow, Friday, September 12

 

text messages 28 - 
my contribution to the SAQA Benefit Auction in 2021

For the first time in many years I have not donated a piece for the SAQA Benefit Auction this year. Despite the fact that I had collected pieces of fabric that I wanted to use right after finishing last year’s piece. But best intentions of starting it immediately after the September ’24 run of the auction were waylaid by our move, my overall state of mind throughout the last year, and, perhaps, a bit by the fact that again my piece sold for only $75. After that one-time big success when my piece sold for $750 in 2020 

text messages 25: love protect repeat, 2020

 

my style has not been terribly well liked with bidders even to the point where one piece didn't get sold at all (and I then took it back from Houston International Quiltfestival). The piece pictured above still sold, though. Add to that frustration the increasing difficulties of getting the pieces shipped to the US – price, regulations as to what you are allowed to send, and then house buying, planning the move…

(And now how are we ever going to get a quilt to the US for such an auction? If SAQA doesn’t figure out a way how to collect the European donations and clandestinely transport them to the US, I wonder whether it is going to break their financial possibilities? I need to find out about their plans for that…)

At least I wanted to post a personal dream collection before bidding starts tomorrow, but I can’t seem to access their site. So all I can do right now is to give you the link:

https://events.handbid.com/auctions/2025-saqa-benefit-auction/items

Hope it works tomorrow – please support SAQA if you can by bidding on a quilt. And perhaps I will again contribute to the auction next year, who knows. But somehow my hopes aren’t high on this issue.

I think I (sort of) hate this quilt.

This past August I was invited to join the ‘Voyage’ International Textile Artists Group and immediately said yes. As with joining the 20 Perspectives, my aim was to boost my creativity, have something to work towards, giving me some kind of anchorage in this terrible year 2024, hoping, it would all turn out for the better.

At first, I had said I would most likely not be able to contribute to the group’s upcoming exhibition at BMO ’25, thinking it would prove to be too much stress to whip out a quilt in the short amount of time I would have once we finished our move. Especially as the topic ‘alchemy’ didn’t exactly cause a flood of ideas that asked to be put into a quilt.

When we started unpacking all our boxes in the new apartment, however, the first thing I put on the design wall was a conglomeration of fabrics with a special meaning, because I had come up with an idea after all. Searching the internet for a definition led me, of course, to Wikipedia, and the German page defines the term ‘alchemy’ as „die Lehre von den Eigenschaften der Stoffe und ihren Reaktionen“, i.e. the doctrine of the characteristics of elements/materials and their reactions with each other. (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemie)

The German noun “Stoffe”, however, also means ‘fabrics’, which gave me a short cut for my interpretation. Fabrics have a relationship and some kind of reaction when they are put next to each other, especially when sewn together, and when special fabrics are joined, the alchemy between them takes off. I decided to pair some of my special fabrics that were all waiting to be used: rust dyed fabric pieces I had brought home from my trip to South Africa, an indigo dyed scarf, the kimono from my collage project with Kathleen Loomis. I discovered that the pattern on the indigo dyed scarf, which I liked in its design but didn’t wear much because it felt too narrow, was off-set a bit when folded in half: the patterns don’t exactly match. Which I really like a lot.

 

The rust-dyed pieces came home with me from South Africa, and I love them for their coloring, intensity of pattern, and, of course, because they remind me of the trip to Krueger Park and the quilt festival at Johannesburg.

 

Alchemy, in my understanding for this quilt, is not only restricted to the interaction of chemical elements, but I am extending it to fabrics, when placed next to each other. Putting it all together felt good, and after a bit of turning and changing I liked to layout, too.

First attempt - but it got turned around.

 

However, as I had noticed before in another context, but completely forgotten, the rusted fabrics from South Africa are so tightly woven that they are VERY difficult to sew, which was the reason why I had not used these particular fabrics up yet. Sewing them was hard for the machine, and quilting over them caused multiple thread breakages, disruptions in the quilting process and unpleasant loops on the backside. I was indeed getting to the point where I could have thrown this piece out of the window!

 

Deciding on a quilting design then proved another challenge. Yet when I started reading former chancellor Angela Merkel’s memoir that was published recently, and read the section on her most famous (or infamous) statement throughout the 16 years of her chancellorship, I thought it would be interesting to add another layer of alchemy. The quote is from 2016, when Germany was facing the massive influx of more than one million Syrians fleeing the civil war in their country, and quite a few other refugees from several other countries. Chancellor Merkel said that Germany had faced so many difficult situations and overcome them, and that we would be able to deal with and overcome this challenge as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDQki0MMFh4

Interestingly enough, her full statement was hardly ever quoted, but reduced to the three-word-phrase ‘we will manage’. Events following this massive influx of refugees had and still have quite an alchemic-like effect on German society, which I myself felt vividly while I was trying to accompany refugees through the maze of German administration, rules and regulations, giving them guidance for everyday life in a country that is rather different from their own. For this quilt on alchemy I decided to put as much of the quote onto the quilt surface as would fit, and except for a few last words, most of it is on there.

 

Yes, I hated the quilting because of the difficulties with the densely woven fabric. No, I don’t think it is one of my strongest quilts. But it is giving a platform for some of my favorite fabrics, and it includes a statement for which I still admire our former chancellor. At this particular moment it is still not clear whether we have indeed managed to deal with the crisis, our current political situation is partly due to that refugee crisis (combined with problems going back to German reunification, and probably even further back). And in the end I don’t really hate this quilt. But it made a good title for this post (which I started some time in December and am only now finding time to finish).

 

Addendum: This quilt will be on display together with the other Voyage quilts in the collection "Alchemy" at the Scottish Quilt Show in Glasgow in March and at the Brno Patchwork Meeting in April.