No Café Leisure, anywhere…

 

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.)

Sending to Australia

 

Off he goes...

Three weeks ago I put my 21-yr-old onto a plane to Australia where he will spend his ‘semester abroad’. (As he is studying in the Netherlands, ‘abroad’ from our point of  view anyway, this is indeed a special situation. He could have gone to Düsseldorf, but, not surprisingly, that wasn’t abroad enough for him.) Hard to believe that the funny little boy is so grown-up that he manages and undertakes things like that by himself now. Well, not exactly or entirely by himself, the parents are paying, and some organizational matters... But now he is gone, has arrived at his destination after a short stopover in Sydney and is finding his footing in his first weeks of studies.

I used him as a kind of letter-pigeon and asked him to post a letter to India Flint which contained my contribution to her collaborative international stitching project for an exhibition in February 2027.

She had written about that on her Substack last November, asking for embroidered pieces of remembrance, all in neutral colour “with perhaps a few mother-of-pearl buttons”. I had immediately known that I wanted to contribute but had lingered as to what to embroider on my piece of linen. My father’s name? Larger issues, such as peace of mind, humankind, humanity? Slightly preposterous, but it was on my mind. Finally, I decided on 'Palästina', the German version of Palestine. That offers three opportunities to attach a mother-of-pearl button for the Umlaut-dots and the dot on the I (which my father’s name would not have made possible). And I chose the German version, because I wanted to express that my grief for Palestine is the harder for me because I am fully aware that the German persecution and attempted extinction of Jews were very influential in the founding of the state of Israel, and thus in everything that has passed in that area since then. 

I managed not  to take a photo of the finished piece from the front, but only from the back.

Backside of a piece of linen with "Palästina" stitched onto in chainstitch

 My son has let me know that he has posted the item, and it remains to be seen whether it will be visible in whatever India Flint will make out of it.

After too long a time

 I returned to my sewing machine last week.

Because of family reasons I had not been near it for more than six weeks, and felt rather deprived. I had fun at the Patchwork Gilde’s annual event, which took place after my last post.

Susan Vogel and I showing off our certificates for 
presenting exhibitions at the AGM-weekend. Susan 
was responsible for the EQA Round Bobbins (I loved her husband's 
wonderful accompaniment of the event with his didgeridoo 
playing), and I took care of the EQA Contrast Challenge.

 

The Round Bobbins, quite an impressive exhibition in real life!

I did teach a 3-hour workshop on improvisation, which made me 
rather nervous in advance, partly because three hours is just 
too short to get people into an improvising mood. But once I got going, it was fun.

I had knitted a sweater in the meantime, as part of a knit-along, and I finished only a few days after the ‘official’ end date, which is quite astonishing for me as I tend to be not-good-at-all with these x-alongs. With this one, I had chosen a (rather expensive) yarn from my stash with a high linen-component and found quite a lot of tiny fiber pieces in the yarn that made me suspicious whether they would bother me when wearing it, so I spent A LOT! OF! TIME! Picking out those pieces, which, of course, slowed down my process considerably. 

 

I was actually happy with the result, and I had even sort-of-liked the way the instructions were written, at least to me they did not seem quite so clumsy as many other written instructions, and I thought I might knit another sweater after that mode again at a later point in time. 

 

I really liked the combination of the light green and the variegated red...

Unfortunately, because the linen yarn had not been enough and I had supplemented it with a silk yarn from my stash (from India – should have made me suspicious!), which really enhanced the outcome, danger was lurking that I did not suspect. Having been a dyer I should have known… The sweater came out of the first wash completely ruined because the read had run and turned the light green into an unpleasant brown. Home remedies to take out the discoloration exacerbated the catastrophe and I threw the sweater into the bin. That’s a way of de-stashing, too. Threw away the remaining skein of the red yarn as well.

 

The green had lost its lustre completely after the first wash, and things 
got even worse after I tried home-remedies against discoloration.

Upon my arrival at my husband’s place last week I first put the sleeve on my contribution to the EQA-challenge “Insects” that will be shown in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines. Being the one who organizes the transport I am in a fortunate position that I can still finish my piece even after the deadline has passed…

"Picasso Beetle in Yellow", 35x35cm, 2026.

 

Then I picked up the beginnings of my third piece in the Femina series for 20 Perspectives, which would have been ‘due’ on the day of my return. It was completed yesterdaymorning, and you can read a little bit about it here. (I did sleep on it for another night and changed something this morning.) I am not sure whether I am really happy with it, so it is more of a chore finished. Which is a pity as I was happy enough with the first two pieces in the series. But I really struggled with this one, and I feel I have been struggling with my quilting for a while now, so I need to get going with getting my creative juices flowing again.

I have decided to start a piece for the juried EQA exhibition “Desire” for February and concentrate on getting that finished, perhaps this will help get me back on track.

The Whale and The World Beyond

 

For the past several weeks Germany was obsessed with a humpback whale’s fate after it got stuck on a sand bed in the Baltic (where it wasn’t supposed to be to begin with). It wasn’t possible to avoid being confronted with the steps of development in the poor creature’s fate. Attempts at rescue, re-grounding, then after several weeks they transported it to the North Sea to be released, now the tracker is not transmitting – is it dead or was the tracker dismantled? 

Still media coverage – and all that time I was wondering whether it would be possible to write a theatre play about this, titled “The Whale”. I would have liked to contrast all these whale drama developments with the real problems going on in the world right now. And there are many that appeared to be of much less concern to the German media recently than the poor whale. I have tried to put all my thoughts about this into a blog post – which did get written, but the play will not. But then I decided I wasn’t going to write about the whale either. I bet there are enough places on the internet where you can inform yourself about the developments. (Breaking news of the day there is a dead whale near Denmark, but not certain yet whether it is the same one.... )

Instead I will be happy that the third box of EQA quilts arrived, that I get to put it up in the CCS in Suhl for German Patchwork Gilde’s annual event and that I will be in a patchwork bubble for a few days.

Bea, Monika and Regina were a fantastic team of helpers. 
Never have I been involved in such a quick putting-up of an exhibition! 
Admittedly, well prepared through prior presentations, beginning in Alsace, and, latest, Finland.
Thank you to everybody involved ahead of us!

View onto a minor section of half of the "Contrast" EQA exhibit 
at Patchwork Gilde's AGM in Suhl.

 

 I know this is a bit of escapism, but I am having difficulties processing the world right now.

 

Stitching helps me, if not the world, unfortunately.