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.

When life gets in the way...

 

A couple of days ago I read a post by Anna Wharton who posts as White Ink on Substack about how life had got in the way so she couldn't write her weekly newsletter. It feels a little bit like that for me right now, except that I can't say what the reasons were for never completing and posting the two starts for posts that were waiting in my 'blogger stash'. I did get started, then something called me away, I never returned, time passed, I did keep telling myself 'you must put this into the post'... And here we are, again it has been too long, really, since my last post.

On Tuesday I spent an involuntary hour at Hamburg main station
 because of a canceled train. I tried to make the best of it by 
taking pictures, 'training' my eye. I posted more of 
those on my instagram account, @justquiltsjustcolors.

 

A lot has happened, even some things in my art-part of life, and it won't be possible to now catch you up on everything. But I am still at the beginning of almost 4 weeks off work - 2 weeks for my 'off-time' and another 2 weeks vacation - so I may actually be able to sew and write again? We'll see.

During our 20 Perspectives bi-weekly zoom-meeting two weeks ago we talked at length about the exhibitions that our various collections have been traveling with, and I realized that I had no real understanding where my quilts were going or had been. And will be going. We do have a spreadsheet for the group that lists exhibition dates and venues, but I admit, once a quilt is on its way to somewhere I don't check that spreadsheet. But we had a lot of exhibitions, and after I finish writing this post I will try to post two videos on Instagram that members of the group sent of our exhibitions, so you can get an impression of what's going on with 20 Perspectives. (Keep your fingers crossed that this works! That's another something going on ... me and digital stuff ... no further comment!) During the discussion it became clear that the recent developments of world situation, shipping restrictions, uncertainties, tariffs etc. have made it decidedly more difficult to transfer quilts to and from wherever they are. The group is a web of clandestine quilt movements, and I am certain none of us could easily recollect who is taking whose quilt to where to be handed over when and to whom. 

Just how precarious shipping has become I have experienced during the past three weeks. I was informed that three boxes of EQA-quilts of the challenge "Contrast" had been shipped to me from Finland. Two arrived rather quickly. The third one was missing. 

 

Tracking information told me it had never left Finland. The Finnish IR called the post office. She called again. Tracking information was removed from the app because of time lapse. No news from the search in Finland... I was getting nervous. I had only told the Finnish IR, who did the searching on her end, and our new EQA Chair because I did not want to scare anybody else. But it seemed like it was getting tight because my husband and I are leaving next week and if nobody is here to receive the package... Tuesday afternoon I suddenly received an email that the next day the box would be delivered - and it was. What a relief. Now there are three boxes, and the exhibition at Patchworktage in Suhl in May can go ahead as planned. And I will suggest to EQA that we start shipping those collections with air tags!

When walking to the hairdresser yesterday I passed the 
local pond and liked the light condition. And the fact that 
spring is slowly beginning to put green on the trees.

 

I recently returned to my husband's place and immediately started working on my piece for EQA's challenge 'Insects', which will premiere at Carrefour in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines in September. Fortunately, I am the person who is in charge of delivery of German entries and have a lot of time left, because I don't have to send it anywhere in advance. But I would like to get it done soon, quickly, to be able to continue with other things. It was a messy situation yesterday, because I had put markings onto the piece by sewing over paper and that had to be removed. Not a favorite activity of mine...

 

For this piece I let myself be inspired by the so-called Picasso-Bug, using a selection from the markings on its back and changing coloring a bit. It will be called "Picasso Bug in Yellow". Here is a first glimpse.

Probably the orientation is going to change in the final state, 
but that needs to be decided.

 

Also further planning for my next "Femina"-piece for 20 Perspectives. Need to order some custom printed fabric for that!

What to say.

In the news they are counting the days since the attack on Iran - "day x since ..." - and that number also indicates the days since I have completely lost hope that the world will find a way out of this misery. Of course, we need to add the number of days since Feb 24, 2022, the attack on Ukraine (or, more honestly: since 2015, the annexing of Krimea), and the days since Oct. 7, 2023 and what Israel has been doing to Gaza - note: I completely condemn the mass murder on Israeli citizens that day. But the degree of retaliation has been out of measure. And I don't know what to say. Don't forget Sudan, Myanmar... it is absolutely horrifying that humans can't seem to be able to live in peace. Sometimes I wish that somebody would just push the button, blow us all up and leave the planet devoid of the human race, certainly it would fare better like that. Then there might be hope.

Stitching and sewing and knitting seems irrelevant in the current situation. And yet I continue, to avoid despair.

20 Perspectives had their newest reveal last week, and although my piece isn't entirely finished, there is a blog post up and can be seen here.  The title hasn't been decided on finally, yet, but it's probably going to be "Who is Afraid of Ana Mendieta?", since her work was inspirational for this piece, as I describe on the 20 Perspectives blog.

As of yet Untitled...

 The edges haven't been finished yet, but I do hope to get around to that next week.

And I have an idea for the third piece in the series, it's brewing in my mind. 

I am still juggling with my two laptops and having a hard time getting myself acquainted with GIMP for photo editing, but hope to get around that soon as well.

Good and interesting news is that I was invited to have a solo show at Dansk Patchwork Forening's  annual AGM in August. At first that came as a complete surprise, I had  somehow given up on having another solo show again, was concentrating on making quilts for the individual challenges of 20 Perspectives, and for Voyage (we had a show in Glasgow weekend before last, and will have an exhibition at Nadelwelt Karlsruhe in May). 

 

And I have been invited to pick a virtual gallery for SAQA for June, which is going to be fun and interesting. Will that cheer me up? A bit, certainly. But what I really and truly want is for all the wars on this planet to end. It's absolutely not right to continue like this.  

Looking forward to going to teach at Petersberg next week. Three days of retreat in a house where you can sew all day and don't have to bother about the rest of the world is just what I need now!

Lost in transition

 

This photo was shown me by my phone a couple of days ago asa memory from the cloud. Nice. That happened during a week straight from hell at work, even nicer. (The hell aspect of work has resided a bit, but I do feel rather unappreciated by the employers, and that is not a fun-enhancing factor when going to work and you are supposed to be nice to patients.)

For a while now I have been trying to transition from one laptop to another (the while is going on to a year now, bear with me), procrastinating, because that transition includes the loss of my photo editing software. I have been trying to find something new that's satisfying, but somehow have not been very successful in that. I really only need a bit of color adjustment, size adjustment and prettying up the pictures so I can post them here on the blog, but my most recent attempt at getting acquainted with Gimp is not proving satisfactory. It keeps getting hung up, I don't find it intuitively easy and I am getting a bit grouchy about all this. 

Add to this last night's experience that my online e-book library is transitioning and the new version is getting hung up on me, too. Is this a kind of digital Bermuda triangle I am caught up in?

Last week we had winter. 

This is actually one of the photos Gimp let me do before 
clogging up on me - it is the balcony at my husband's
 place, whereas now I am up north again.

 

Germany hasn't had much of any kind of winter in recent years, so this took getting used to. Virtually impossible to buy stuff to put on the sidewalk to prevent people from slipping, everything was sold out - but you are not supposed to throw road salt for environmental reasons, but you are obliged to put something as the owner of a house. I reverted to throwing ash from the oven to dull the ice. Now it seems to be melting but they are announcing more cold... I do like winter, although it makes going places by bike harder. I actually resolved that I would be going to work by car (after slipping on an icy road with my bike, fortunately no broken bones or anything.) The down side of winter last week was that it was so cold that the lake was frozen and I could not go for my daily cold-water-dip. That has improved, two days ago it was possible again and I feel much better.

While I was at my husband's place, I learned that "Legendary Blue NuDenim" was indeed selected for Patchwork Gilde's Tradition bis Moderne exhibition, which I was very happy about. I started working on my next piece for 20 Perspective's "Femina" challenge, reverting to my technique of custom-made paper templates.

 

It's been so long that I made anything with this technique that I was a bit out of practice and may have been not thorough enough about adding marks for joining and adjustment. But it is only a small piece, I hope to get it finished nevertheless. I did go for a couple of rather small curves that make sewing tricky, but one grows with the challenge. Unfortunately I can't show you more pictures right now because see above...

When in the north I do knitting and am currently working on a Spot-Sweater after a pattern by Anne Ventzel which I have been waiting to do for several years. Unfortunately her instructions completely DON'T fit my body and it has taken my three starts to get it somehow to fit - not completely happy with the neck region either, but hoping that it will work out after blocking. That taught me once again something I have known all along: knitting after somebody else's instructions is not for me. I hate the way these instructions are written up these days, and I would rather work after my measurements and change stuff as I go. So further knitting projects will at best take an idea from somewhere and adapt them without sticking to any kind of written instruction. Again, you will have to wait for a picture here, sorry.

Hope to be back with a more cheery approach to posting than this one - but I have been procrastinating this post due to all the difficulties with the photos although I have been thinking about what I could write about.. 

 

Imagine…

 … you come home from a couple of days of a workshop aka retreat, after which you went to see and support your aging mother after heart surgery for a few days, and when unpacking the car, you realize that the foot pedal for your sewing machine has gone missing. You call the location where the workshop took place, they haven’t found anything. You make an inquest in the group of attendees, nobody has seen anything. You go through all the boxes you had with you, nothing in there. You check the case for the sewing machine into which the pedal would naturally and instinctively be packed at the end of the days for the sixth or seventh time and it still hasn’t materialized there. You go back to the car and check under the seats, in the luggage compartment (and that’s only a small car, it couldn’t really hide anywhere). Nothing.

You have a wonderfully uninterrupted full week of empty days ahead of you and wanted to get started on at least two projects that are looming with a deadline, one more urgent than the other. The spare machine is located in your other abode 600 km away.

The machine is waiting, yes, in this setup the enclosure is not there yet,
because it will be easier to attach the cords once the pedal will have arrived... 

You call a sewing machine dealer and order a new pedal, click on ‘immediate money transfer’ (which costs an additional fee with the bank) when making your payment, you had the affirmation that the dealer would ‘send as soon as payment comes in’ (and payment should have been visible on their account within minutes), but it takes three days for them to acknowledge payment was received, now they would ‘send quickly’. That was three days ago, today’s post is in and did not include that parcel. There isn’t a whole lot left of that full week to get started on those two projects by now.

Meanwhile, you kept yourself busy hand-stitching more French Knots on a piece you’ve been working on, but to determine how many knots exactly still need to be added you do need to start on the binding at the top because only then will you know how far down from the top edge you will need to stitch. Which can only happen with a sewing machine…

French Knots on "The Essence Behind the Words" for the
"Femina" challenge of 20 Perspectives

Other things you can occupy yourself with is starting to put together a huge piece of hexagons made from 1-inch-diamonds that you started more than 3 years ago and which had progressed to a point where you only need to make about 10 more of those hexagons to have enough, 

and of course you keep re-arranging some, exchanging a couple with each other, and actually joined some already. 

Nice surprise that the appearance of the hexagons changes considerable when they are joined, the background of the fabric they have been pinned onto disappears and they blend together somewhat. So that’s a good result of the week.

Hoping the foot pedal will arrive tomorrow? Keep your fingers crossed for me, please! 

At least the Choir of Angels has been out for a few weeks already, to be honest, since I had to go up to the attic to find a quilt which was supposed to go to an exhibition in the US and would have found a clandestine carrier to evade customs, but which is still missing in action. Who know when that will resurface - before or only after the next move?

I may have to purchase a couple more musicians before Christmas to give myself a shopping expierence gratification!

 

A few hours at the machine, catching up.

 

One major disadvantage of my current living arrangement (there aren’t many!) is that I don’t have good sewing equipment/arrangement at the place where I work and spend more time. I was assuming I would be doing a lot of sewing at my husband’s accommodation and not have too much time for it anyway where I live for work. This summer, however, I spent a lot less time down south than had been the original. It felt like I hadn’t done any serious sewing in ages.

 Two weeks ago I picked up my son in Amsterdam, first spending a day in that beautiful tourist-ridden city (yes, I was one of them, I know).

Amsterdam at night.

City of bikes... this one looks like it hasn't been used in a while!

Not the typical tourist photo subject!

  I went to see the Banksy museum and the photography museum.

 

And picked up some batting at the quilt shop which is conveniently located a mere 5-minute walk from his nice (and outrageously expensive) apartment on one of the grachten. Students these days do live rather differently than I did when I was in that stage of my studies! Not that I needed a quilt shop back then.

The next day we drove south-east together and then spent almost a week at my husband’s place.

View from my sewing room - and when my son is home, 
I also sleep in this room on a small mattress on the floor.

 

There I finally got to sit down at my sewing machine again. I managed to proceed pretty far with my contribution to the next 20 Perspectives challenge which will be revealed in the group next week and then visible on the 20 Perspectives Blog a few days afterwards. Although mine won’t be entirely finished by reveal date because I decided to start adding hand-stitches (French Knots) in addition to the bit of machine quilting I used.

There used to be a time when I said 'I don't do appliqué'.
That seems to have changed.

 

I also managed to get ahead with the 3D-piece we were supposed to have finished a while ago – was it June? But I also decided that I will try to enter it in a call for entry so won’t publish a ‘finished photo’ until I receive notification of acceptance or rejection.

 

Made a decision about two quilts for Voyage, too, so right now I am only two quilts short for that group commitment, but those two are the ones that need to be finished earlier and I really need to get going about them. I do have an idea, but…

It definitely felt good to be back sewing, after all that time. Almost like going back after withdrawal symptoms. Certainly the urge to be 'making' with one's hands can be a kind of addiction. When I pack my bags for train travel I take enough knitting supplies to last me at least twice or three times the length of the journey. After all, the train could be delayed. Or we could be hijacked and I would be caught in there without having something to keep me occupied. Better be prepared.

June 17th

 

Going for a bike ride in the afternoon I saw this solitary rape flower in the field...

On June 17, 1953, an uprising took place in the Eastern part of then-separated Germany, people went on strike and protested against the regime, unfulfillable raising of quotas of production, political conditions. At least 50 people died when Russian troops intervened. (Find historical notes in English here. Find historical notes in German here.)

Subsequently, June 17^th was declared a National Holiday in the West, called “Day of German Unity”. It was scratched from the list of holidays when German reunification took place in 1990, and October 3^rd became the new National Holiday.

In a way, the events of June 17, 1953, influenced my family’s history.  Shortly afterwards a brief period of family reunifications began and my grandmother and her two younger daughters (one of them would become my mother) could legally leave the GDR to join my grandfather, who had left the country by swimming through a small river after he had been told that Russian authority were planning to arrest him. Without that uprising, who knows what would have happened?

As the day came and went this year I read several newspaper commentaries on the fact that Germany currently does not have a Memorial Day for victims of GDR-rule, and only this year a first (temporary) memorial was created in Berlin. The history of Germany as a divided country is still very present in my mind due to the fact that my mother’s eldest sister stayed behind because she was already married when her mother and sisters left, and her husband thought he could not leave the small business he had taken over from his parents – only to be disappropriated a few years later. I always thought it would have been rather appropriate to keep June 17^th as a national holiday. Or choose November 8 or 9 as a day of national remembrance, because so many historical events took place on that day, it would have made much more sense than taking October 3^rd.

After the last couple of rather emotional weeks and a lot of work I have gone to be with my husband for a few days and could use the not-anymore-holiday as a quiet day. Yesterday and the day before I had finally sat down to work on my newest piece for the next 20 Perspectives challenge. The topic is “3D”, which is not my piece of cake at all, but I just had to go along with the group’s decision. Which resulted in me putting it off for much longer than was wise, except for a little bit of planning a few weeks ago.

 

Using denim – which I never expected to be doing in quilts – I am working on an appropriated version of Henri Matisse’s “Blue Nude”. Attaching the denim bits on the background fabric was relatively quick and easy.

 

Now I wonder why I had the idea to use seed stitch for the entire background…

 

 Listening to an audio book, sitting on the balcony and enjoying the sunshine time passed pleasantly enough, and I already got a lot of the stitching done.

Fortunately, reveal date was pushed back by 2 weeks, so I will be relatively close to finishing, I hope, by the time that date rolls around.