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.)