on the side

 I am a sucker for scraps, I must have mentioned this before. And as my 'big' projects right now are either waiting to be accepted or rejected, or will be entered somewhere I can't really write about anything else. So while I am running interior dialogues as to how to proceed with the thing that is behind me on the wall - can I come up with another way of transferring the text onto the top instead of using the dissolvable film I have been using so far, because I don't want to have to boil this one to dissolve the film...? - I spent a part of the afternoon sorting through a box of scraps which has been under my feet for a while.

I am certain many people have boxes like these. The sorting process is soothing, and I try to decide whether they are still eligible to be included in crazy scrapping, then they get sorted into stacks according to color, perhaps value as well.

note: the box is still in the background

And just how small do scraps have to get before you throw them into the bin without regret?

I have a few templates lyeing around which determine the future according to size of scraps that occur. This hexagon is the smallest one of the templates and takes care of really small scraps. The hexagons finish at half an inch. I also do diamonds. One inch.

For this one, I timed myself the other day. If the pieces have been prepared (they are sorted in bags by light - medium - dark values) sewing this takes about 20something minutes. Not that it matters to know that, really, during making. Perhaps later, when - if - the thing should ever get finished and some smart viewer asks 'so how long did it take you to make that?'

I haven't come up with a really good method for that text transferral yet, but I did clean out that box and could put something else into it. One thing ticked off the list.

Tomorrow I will be teaching a three-hour-online version of my IQ class for the German Guild's "Summer Academy". Preparing for that has taken quite a bit of time during the last two weeks (and I had a busy time at work). I never wanted to teach online. I had thought I was finished teaching that class. What a combination. 

I do admit, I am a bit nervous. Sending out the announcement e-mail was ridden with bumps and errors already. The past few days my internet connection has been instable, which is not a good prerequisite for online activities that are supposed to be constant, for at least three hours. Let's just hope things go well.

home? (Diary of recovery)

 

30 degrees Celcius is hot for Germany. We haven’t had many days like that yet this year. But today we did, and the forecast is predicting a few more. I stayed inside for a good part of the day, finishing a small quilt I had started after the SAQA Europe/Middle East Zoom Meeting had agreed that we would be having monthly challenges to a cue. Can’t remember who decides on the cues, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s no obligation to participate and I decided I would if the cue agrees with me, but won’t if it doesn’t. Then the first cue was ‘home’ and I immediately thought ‘oh no…’. German is my mother tongue, and English ‘home’ frequently is translated as ‘Heimat’ (although it could be ‘Zuhause’ as well), and ‘Heimat’ is a term that has taken a shift towards more and more nationalistic (it feels to me) tendencies that I don’t feel comfortable with. I live in a place that does not feel ‘home’ to me, in fact, I think for the largest part of my life I haven’t lived in a place that I would call home, emotionally. So transforming a picture of the place where I live (or want to live) into a small quilt as Els Mommers so beautifully does about her home, the island of Saba.  (Here is an article on Els winning first prize for a quilt at the International Quilt Festival in Mexico.)

That is not something I can do, pictorial in quilts is not mine. But a word has letters, is a text, and under the shower I did come up with a kind of design that plays with the letters, their arrangement, shape. Although I did not get far after the first conception of an idea, a sketch, and the two first seams in the middle of July, I sat down today and said ‘this needs to be finished or you might as well quit fooling yourself’.

 

 

I call it ‘How do you spell that and what is it anyway? (text messages 23)’

This cue found me in a phase when I have been doing a lot of thinking about this country I live in, should call my home, but it just doesn’t feel like I would want it to do.

It is summer, people are staying at home or vacationing in Germany, only few are going abroad. Debates about mandatory testing of returning tourists, demonstrations against Covid19-restrictions (face masks are infringing on our personal liberty!), experiences of people’s rudeness towards each other is making me worried about the direction this society is going. As I am listening to ‘Pale Rider’ yet another time – it has become the soundtrack for my experience of the pandemic in limbo – I am growing more and more distanced towards my fellow country folks. And that showed up in this quilt, I guess.

And on to the carousel... (Diary of recovery)

The quilt that I am not writing about anymore is finished. I took it off the longarm a week ago.  Quilting had provided a serious problem because after the first few lines I realized that the longarm machine did not like the pieces of reflecting fabric that are included in the quilt. The thread kept breaking, and after the third or fourth time I decided, I would do that in a controlled manner. I interrupted the line at each piece of reflector fabric. However, I also decided that I did not want to do on-the-spot-securing of thread when stopping or beginning. At that point not really realizing just how many threads that needed to be sunk this method would produce. I mean, I know I had taken that decision consciously. But I did curse myself when I took the quilt off the machine – no, even earlier, when the stopping and starting again added so many more movements to be done and actions to be taken to the exercise of adjusting the locks.

And the deadline for Q=A=Q approaching, and sinking threads not being my favorite part of finishing a quilt… Definitely an activity I would outsource immediately if I had the financial means or the human resources department in the background that could deal with that!

At some point I was near to panicking and complained to Kathy about it in our mails. She wisely suggested I pull the threads to the back, proceed with the facings, have it photographed on time and deal with sinking them at a later time. This advice grounded me to a certain degree, because it made me think about how much time it would cost me to pull the threads to the back in comparison to sinking them right away. I had been smart enough to time myself for one complete process of sinking. I could do one double set of threads in one minute and 15 seconds. That was a single process which went normally well, no difficulties, tangles, breaks. So I figured make it one minute and a half to two minutes for an averaging calculation, and I briefly surveyed the number of threads left. Multiply by – and it added up to close to four hours of sinking threads. At the beginning of a hot Sunday without family disturbances – that seemed doable. And it was, by Sunday evening it was done. Now with the facings I did indeed take the liberty to finish them so far as to make a photo possible, but the sleeve and upper and lower facings still need to be attached. Nevertheless, I declare it finished.

But somehow entries and I seem to be on a strange footing – because the photographer sent me a small file only, 72 pixels, not enough MB. Which I discovered yesterday evening when I wanted to get the entry process done with. I wrote an email and could only hope that they had not messed up with the camera settings when taking the photo, and that they would be able to send me a decent file before the deadline ran out. Luckily this worked out, I have managed to register with the new entry system (compared to last time entry a few years ago), and although the system wanted to circle me through the process several times and I thought I had lost everything and would need to re-type everything, in the end it worked. (I don’t need to mention that my printer did not want to print the receipt at first, but by now I am smart enough not to close that page until I have indeed seen the correctly printed page.) I am set on entering this quilt in all the upcoming possibilities of entering, and there are at least 5 I know of currently, could be more) until it gets accepted somewhere.

Off to new horizons, though. It felt good to complete a piece, in a relatively short time, and not a small one at that (58 by 63 inches). I have started on a new idea. For one never knows – this one might be accepted right away and then I might want to have others to enter in the following calls for entry.

Quilting as exercise (Diary of recovery but I am not counting anymore)

A title like that probably makes most of us think of taking a piece of scrap fabric, layering a sandwich and then going about some free motion quilting exercises, or just a sample block to get experience with a certain pattern. Well, let me tell you, you are wrong!
Currently I am quilting that quilt I am not writing about here anymore and I am using a gadget for the first time which I have had since I got the longarm, but just never used, the channel locks, to make straight lines. It will be an irregular grid. But! The unhappy setup of my machine in a room where you can't walk around it makes it necessary that for every time I rearrange the locks I need to do a knee bend, take out the locks, get up, reposition the machine, knee bend to reposition the locks.

That is exercise, I tell you!
Just as well that my vacation on the North Sea had been at a hotel where I went to two yoga sessions a day. Which did not necessarily include knee bends, but it helps, I am sure. So right now I have finished the grid lines in one orientation, and have turned the quilt - another something I haven't done since owning the machine. Planning to start on the lines in the cross direction soon, perhaps today.
This quilt is finished only after a long wait for my big machine, which I patiently endured, first without substitute solutions because the shop kept ensuring me 'it will be done the next one in line'. After three days of that I'd had enough and put up a makeshift arrangement with the smaller machine I have.

When that had been up for a day I finally got the call that I could come and fetch the big one, and then it was a herculean task to put the top together that I am not writing about anymore. Unfortunately, the longarm doesn't like the pieces of reflective fabric that are included in there, and when I had realized that the thread breakings were due to that I started interrupting the lines at the reflective pieces. Now I will have lots of threads to sink. Which I would have had with the breakings, too, but at least this way it saves me the rethreading of the needle, and the serendipity of it happening.

What else has happened? When I went for walks on the beach, I picked up plastic and trash, although I have to say it was not quite as bad as it could have been. Perhaps due to the fact that this was a sandy beach with a lot of difference between high and low tide, the water might just take everything with it that it has deposited?

Contens of my plastic-collecting bag (yes, a plastic bag, too, but after that I used
my fabric bag)

At one point I dug out a plastic jug, probably for 3/4 gallon (3 liters), which was filled with sand and water and had been submerged under the sand, extruding only with a small corner. It was so heavy that I would have had a hard time carrying it all the way to the next trash can (there weren't many on the beach!). Luckily, a kite buggy teacher was just packing up his gear a couple of hundred yards away and I gave it to him, asking him to put it in a bin, and then continued my walk.

But it has been over a week since I have come back. I spent a good time at my spinning wheel recently, too, because I had joined a team for the Tour de Fleece with the Tour de France, and this is a large part of my results:

I signed up for QuiltCon together.

And I am trying not to worry too much about irresponsible behaviour of German tourists abroad and underreflected people at home, infection numbers here are rising. At the beach I had been mildly impressed at people's discipline about standing in line, something which used not to be a strong habit in German culture.

But despite the fact that Germany so far has done so well in terms of maintaining it all, people's patience is waning fast. They don't believe it's real because 'so few infections'. I just keep listening to that book on the Spanish Flu and hope that our sanity will prevail. Although I do see the problem with trying to maintain an infectious disease in the way we are doing it now does overtax people's patience. With the Spanish Flu, it ravaged, many died, and then it was over. The way we are trying to do it, it will stay with us for so long - or we have to let it run its course. Interstingly enough, health systems as we have them now exist partly due to that experience of the Spanish Flu - and they are overwhelmed if the measures aren't taken as well. One sentence in that book rings in my mind constantly. It goes somewhat like 'it is not a question whether we are going to have another flu pandemic. It is just the question what kind of world it will be that is struck by it.' Well, it's not a flu, but any virulent virus can do the trick...

Bucket list?

About 10 days ago I participated in the SAQA ‘live chat’. The current president Deborah Boschert talked about the importance of having a ‘bucket list’ and that entering Quilt National is on hers this year, and then she sent us into the chat groups to talk about whatever it was that would come up.

In the first group we talked about bucket lists. What people had on theirs in terms of quilting. And I started wondering whether I still have a bucket list in terms of quilting. My general bucket list includes sailing around the world visiting a lot of the many islands we have on the planet.  Never knew whether a bucket list proper is supposed to carry items that are relatively easy and practicable to be made happen. Sailing around the world visiting many islands doesn’t seem to fall into that category, at least not without a huge inheritance coming along my way, which is not very likely to happen either. Oh well.

Living by the sea or at least on some body of water would be another point. Which again doesn’t seem very likely or possible right now, not only but also of the financial situation. So I am scaling down to spending vacation on the seaside, better than nothing. Right now, for a week, and it had been planned before the virus hit.

very windy today, although the water temperature would be feasible for swimming...

There are a number of other items I could mention that would make it onto a bucket list if I really had one, but as they all depend on the financial situation changing dramatically I think I would rather not talk about them in any kind of detail. Perhaps a bucket list should really have on the first position "be content with what you have"?

In the second chat group we did indeed talk about entering Quilt National, does one have to enter three to show that one has a consistent  body of work, did it hurt as much to be rejected from QN as from other shows, quilts that didn’t get into QN but were immediately accepted somewhere else. I have never seriously considered entering QN. Mostly because I don’t take it lightly when I get rejected, and then also because I have seen and heard so many people about how they fret about producing something for the deadline, slaving away – and then the buzz about being in or out. It didn’t sound healthy. But as the live chat finished, I began thinking about the quilt that is currently on my design wall and making (slow) progress. If the progress could be sped up and the quilting finished quickly… it might be an option. But I am not going to stress myself about it. Except for the fact that I must make sure not to post about it here right now...

Day before I went on my one week vacation I took my machine for a check up, and my work table looked really empty. 

I hope it will be finished just when I get back, and then we will see.