Little Escap(ad)e: Freising, Germany

 ow long it has been since I used this particular category for a blog post! Almost six years, and reasons must have been the epidemic, for one thing, and work. (Although I now think I could have put the excursion to Paris with my son in there, as well, when we went to see l'Arc de Triomphe Wrapped. I didn't think of that then.)

Now we are living in a new place that is still a bit foreign to us, and I felt the need to get out, see a friend, taste a bit of the world. Last Saturday I wanted to go to Freising and took the train. Deutsche Bahn unfortunately being what it is right now, the train I had planned on was canceled. Instead of waiting around in a cold and drafty station for over an hour for the next one, I hopped onto another which brought me to Nuremberg. That had not been on my schedule, but gave me an opportunity to make a small detour when changing trains, as I had been wanting to take a look at the oldest globe model, the Behaim Globe, on display at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. 

 

Which I may want to use as inspiration for a quilt I am thinking about. It turned out that the globe’s colors are so faded that the digital presentation, which has been color enhanced, enlarged, and turned into an interactive display, is more attractive to look at than the globe itself. But it gave me enough material to keep contemplating the idea.

As I still had time before I wanted to catch the next train, I tried to make my way towards the world-famous Christkindlmarkt, which I had never been to before. That was not a particularly good idea, on a Saturday, and around midday. I didn’t stay long! Travel to Freising was uneventful, and I was met at the station by my friend Barbara, before we proceeded to her quilt group’s exhibition in the Medieval Prison. (I have written about events in this location before on my German blog and here. )

I loved their exhibition, but somehow didn’t take any photos – perhaps I was too excited about seeing all the group members again after sometimes several years? Barbara and I then spent a leisurely evening at a restaurant, catching up on all that has been going on. It was very good to be talking to a friend and be allowed to vent about the entire year and all its miseries.

Next morning I wanted to – and did – visit the Diözesanmuseum on cathedral hill. However, the one exhibit that I came for specifially, namely the ‘Chapel for Luke and his scribe Lucius the Cyrene’ by James Turrell is only open for rather limited periods during visiting hours.  Which I had not researched properly beforehand – I arrived 20 minutes after the morning period ended and would have had to wait for more than two hours if I wanted to catch the afternoon period. My train home was leaving before that, so I decided to just go with the glimpses of the changes of light colors I could see through the passageway that leads into the installation. 

 

 These photos were taken within only a few minutes, and it gave a small impression of how special it must be to look at these changes when you are in the center of the rooms.

That makes for a good excuse to go to Freising again, soon, with a bit of better planning.

Plans.

Have I mentioned before that one of the life lessons I have learned is that plans are there (mostly) to be changed? (I know I have, it’s a purely rhetorical question.)

Another incident has happened recently which has reinforced this lesson. Fortunately, it was only minor, none of the seriously upsetting things as have been happening in this current-hopefully-soon-past year.

The most recent change of plans is related to this year’s continuing challenge of the 20 Perspectives group. Different from our first challenges, we agreed that this year we would each be working three pieces to the same theme, “Conversing with the Earth”. This decision took us a long time, we were considering ‘Conversation with Earth’, but one member thought that this phrase might be copyrighted because a charity of that name exists. Then there were discussions about the article – what difference are we expressing when we insert the article ‘the’ or not?

Once we had decided on the topic, I knew exactly what piece of fabric I wanted to use, and I have written about the first piece in the mini-series before.

Then life took over, I didn’t finish on time for our June group reveal, and I had to start packing up my studio and life for the move. We have unpacked most of our boxes, my new studio has been put into some kind of working mode, even though it is far from well-organized or tidy yet. But I have managed to do a little bit of sewing, including finishing the first piece for Conversing with Earth. (Minus part of the binding at this particular point in time, and the sleeve.)

 

By now I have already missed out on the second reveal in the series, and here is where the change of plans comes in. Originally, I had thought I would make all three pieces with mudcloth. Apart from the piece I used in the first quilt in the series I have a few more pieces that I acquired from a friend and that are similar enough to the piece I had brought home from South Africa. I imagined it would give unity to my three quilts, clearly marking them as a mini series. But when I pinned the fabrics for planning the next piece onto the design wall, their arrangement and collaboration spoke to me so strongly that it became clear within a split second that I could not cut this piece of mudcloth down to the size requirements of the 20 Perspectives series. It is demanding to be something else.

 

There are a few small remnants of the mudcloth, yes, but they haven’t spoken strongly to me yet so that I could come up with a good design idea. There should also be yet another piece around somewhere, in opposite color orientation – a bit of black marks on off-white background, which I remember seeing when I packed up everything. It was going to have been a major feature in my third quilt of the series. However, it hasn’t reappeared from the boxes yet. I could spend hours searching for it by going through my fabric boxes again and again (I have looked into every single one already!) – or I could wait for it to reappear by itself, which, certainly, will only happen after the next and final reveal date.

Hence, a change of plans is called for. I started cutting up a piece of hand-printed fabric I received as a gift from Jan Soules, also a member of 20 Perspectives, last year when we met in California.

Dolores Miller, me, Deb Cashatt, Kris Sazaki, Jan Soules (from left)
at our outing in California last year November

Then I started combining it with another piece that had already been worked on a bit and was included in my mother’s complete fabric selection she handed over to me recently. 

 

Right now it is simmering on the design wall while I had another stint at my work place, I will return to it tomorrow. Curious, what it will develop into.