Too many temptations!

There are many things on my plate right now. Perhaps a few too many, to be honest. And yet I feel the lure of temptations over and over again, to start yet another project. It takes a lot of strength and energy to resist these temptations, to say ‘no’ and concentrate on things that need to be finished, or finally get around to making real projects I have been planning for a while already.

No, it is not a good idea to sign up for a 4-meeting online course at weird times due to the person offering the class living in a completely different time zone. (For one thing, I would have to negotiate about my work schedule and make sure I could really attend those sessions.) No, I don’t need another set of rather expensive plastic templates for a difficult pattern, thank you, although I like the pattern that could be made with them. (That decision concerns template set no.3, I did cave in with one ruler that I had sent from the US and paid dearly customs fees for, 

The HuRTy by Latifah Saafir, my newest posession.

Precuttings that I am using instead of sew-on-sew-off squares
right now, which will result in another quilt that sewed itself,
in due time. That's the intention, at least.

 

and another set is being brought to Germany from Australia via personal carrier, my many-years-pen-pal’s daughter who has just arrived here for a year abroad during her university studies and will use the set as incentive for her first trip to a German post office one of these days.)

And yet I have to admit that I did commit for one thing and sort of committed for another. The first one I haven’t started on – it’s the Swiss Guilds “Round Bobbin”, for which I have received the bobbin, and the list of prompts, and even THOUGHT about an idea what to do for the first one, ‘paper’. 

 

The other, ‘sort of committed’ is that I am participating in the German Guild’s Sew-Along 

 

which started recently, with the topic of Sea/Ocean, combined with the Alphabet. I did make a personalized version of the first block, an island. 

I won’t make all blocks suggested, as they seem to be rather appliqué-oriented and I am not much into that technique. However, I am planning to substitute for those I omit by making other ocean-related blocks. I may even make some of the letters, but not sure about that yet. The sew-along is free for anyone to participate – if you are quick. For one week each pattern will be freely available on the Patchworkgilde’s website here. After that the pattern is moved to the members-only-section and you would have to be a member to access it. (Instructions in German.)

I am happy that I could send off ‘Mellowed Yellow’ three weeks ago, as it got juried into the German Guild’s Tri-Annual Show “Tradition bis Moderne”. I had entered two different quilts, and out of the two I prefer that Mellowed Yellow got chosen. The show will open in April in Dinkelsbühl, Germany, where it will be on display throughout and beyond this year’s AGM and Patchworktage. After that it will travel through several German towns for the next two years, and it will be shown at EPM in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines in September. 

Mellowed Yellow, started during Corona lockdown to keep my sanity...

 

One thing on my mind that is not strictly quilt-related is the fact that my ‘baby’ will turn 18 in the beginning of May. He has grown very tall and is going to graduate from High School in June (although I sometimes fear that his chilling attitude is just a little bit too chilling, but…) Of course, in a way that is quilt-related, too. I have been meaning to make him a grown-up quilt for his birthday, to substitute for the little-boy-colors one he himself did the layout for several years ago. I have started cutting the new one,

 

including some fabric I had printed from a picture of a notebook page with his little-boy-handwriting I found amongst some discards along the way. 

But if I do want to present him with at least the finished top I better get to work on this one seriously. No time to give in to temptations of various kinds! How good that I have reduced my work load and will only be working three days a week starting in April.

Reveal with 20 Perspectives

 

Detail of "Art Appreciation @ East Side Quilt Gallery"

This past Tuesday the group 20 Perspectives celebrated the reveal of our latest project in an internal zoom meeting, with the prompt architecture/edges. Publication of the respective blog posts followed on Friday, and you can now find all our pieces and descriptions here. There I describe how mine didn't end up displaying the layout of various walls on the edges of political empires.

A could-have-been: outline of the former Berlin Wall
separating the city of my birth.

Another possibility that did not get elected,
the Great Chinese Wall.

Basically, for this prompt I made 3 quilts and cut up a fourth, which had been lying in a box for a while. And I managed to secure a bit of collaboration from Barbara Lange, who digitalized the dog peeing on the wall for me. Thank you, Barbara!

20 Perspectives is a fun group to be part of, and I am using the prompts in a way that surprises me. Except for the very first one, which was still very much in common with what I had been doing before, all the pieces that have followed have been very different from what I have done before.

The next prompt is ‘monochrome’, and I was allotted the color yellow. My favorite color, emotionally, and I have worked with it a lot already. And I have an idea, just need to get somebody’s permission to use a photo of hers as starting point. It’s going to be interesting.

Please take a look at the 20 Perspectives Blog, enjoy the posts and stories, follow the group on Instagram (@20_perspectives), and you can follow the individual members, too.

It’s a Small World

When I was eight years old my family spent eight months in the United States, and towards the end we all boarded a huge white station wagon, toured the Southwest, and ended up in Los Angeles. With three kids in tow who had been taken hiking the canyons, visiting pueblos and various National Parks, a visit to Disneyland was part of the program before we were scheduled to fly home. (It wasn’t as big then as it is now, from what I gather from the website.) 

 

And I LOVED the pavilion ‘It's a Small World’, 

 

and sang the song for years afterwards (we had bought the illustrated book with a blue plastic record). My parents must have suffered....

Just before this past Christmas I realized that I had never heard from SAQA during the Benefit Auction about my donated piece. I checked the SAQA store, and sure enough, there it was, my piece ‘Who Wins in the End?’ still waiting for a buyer.

 

I thought that 2022 might be the first time in all my years of SAQA membership and benefit auction donations that my piece might not find a new home. Kind of frustrating that was, indeed. But only a couple of days later I did receive the message that it had been sold after all – I wrote back to receive the contact information for the buyer – waited for a reply – then finally received the information and sent a thank-you message a few days later. I wrote in English although the first name looked to me like a German spelling.

I thanked her for buying it, and that I was happy it had found a new home in California, because I had spent time in Santa Barbara, and this gave me a new feeling of connection to the state. And a couple of minutes later I received an answer in German. She was thrilled to not only have a quilt of mine now, but a personal mail as well. And she told me that we were ‘connected’ in another way already - she had been told about me from the buyer of her parents’ house in northern Germany, for whom I had quilted a special quilt at some point (when I was still selling fabrics and trying to start being a commercial longarm quilter). That house, where he now lives, is not too far away from the town where my grandparents lived for many years and where I spent my childhood summers. It’s a small world after all.

And about time to think about the next Benefit Auction piece.There's a tradition to uphold by now.

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.

Merry Christmas

 By now we have received a whole load of Christmas cards. And I usually just enjoy them, am grateful for people thinking of us, even though it would be nice to hear from some of them more often throughout the years as well. But this year I realized that two cards touched me more deeply than others. One came from a small local organisation called "Helping Sick Children" (Kranken Kindern Helfen) which runs a school for sick children in the children's hospital in Landshut. We are members in that organisation, although we haven't really done more than being paying members. Obviously the card was made by one of the children in that school.

The other card came from far away - the one letter I receive per year with stamps from Rwanda.

It was sent by Doctor Alfred Jahn, who used to be the Children's Hospital Director in Landshut and is now operating children in Rwanda who suffer from palatine cleft at birth, an organization I donated the money to when I tried my hands at hosting a knit-along several years ago. I have repeatedly donated smaller amounts of money to this organization, always grateful that my child was born healthy, and that we live in an area where universal healthcare and pretty good medical support is readily available. Through my Senegales friends I have learned close on what that means, when a sickness of a child (or an adult) that needs to be treated in hospital can be a life-threatening situation simply because the expenses cannot be paid, and yet treatment would be relatively easily possible. Somehow it all ties together. Recently I listened to an episode of the UNHCR podcast "Awake at night", where Chris Mburu tells about his life, and how it changed when a Swedish woman decided to support him through school in Kenia, although they had never met. This episode had me in tears - while driving to and from work - because it made me feel that my engagement for my Senegalese friends who have come here and were facing the terrible difficulties of German ways of dealing with illegal immigrants was a bit like that. I managed to have a bit of a positive impact on their lives, and there are still ways I can help. Which is wonderful. I received beautiful presents from my special protegee's relatives in Senegal when he went to visit in November, and it was wonderful to feel their gratefulness. Even if it made me a bit ashamed - it is relatively little money compared to what we have and spend. And it means all the difference in the world for them. So although I had to withdraw from my intensive involvement in refugee work to protect my own health, there are still ways I can, and do, and will continue to help. Which is a wonderful feeling.

Merry Christmas, everyone!