Blowing the trumpet

Although I write a blog, and I do have an instagram account, blowing my own trumpet is not one of my strong sides. I hardly ever use facebook anymore, and although I have an account on Pinterest I never post there anymore, I would probably have to search for the password and ID to enter the account. All of this, I think, contributes to the fact thatmy artmaking has never really ‘taken off the ground’ in terms of the kind of success that could have been possible. I don’t like marketing myself, I am not good at it and I would certainly “rather be in the studio” (as that book title goes, which I have on my shelf but never even finished reading) or somewhere else MAKING.

So even when marketing material is being put on my plate it requires a special effort on my side to put that to use.

A couple of days ago it happened that I received a mail from the SAQA exhibition coordinator about another venue that had been added to the itinerary of “Masterwork: Abstract & Geometric” exhibition. My quilt Play of Lines VIII is in that exhibition and has been traveling for a while now. To be honest, when a quilt is ‘on the road’ I don’t usually keep track of where it is, which venue is showing it right now. Only when I receive a mail with the latest news do I take note. So the exhibition will be coming to Germany, too, and it will be shown at the Textilmuseum Max Berk in Heidelberg. That indeed is a location where I have not had a quilt shown yet, and I do feel a certain pleasure at this now. The particular quilt has been shown in that geographical area  a couple of times, Suttgart, Karlsruhe, Ste. Marie-aux-Mines, but the fact that it will make an appearance in that particular museum is a very nice development.

In that same mail Bill included the list of venues where the show had been shown before – including Japan and China. 

International Quilt Festival – Houston, Texas: November 2017

International Quilt Festival – Chicago, Illinois: April 2018

Quilt & Stitch Show - Tokyo, Japan: October 4 - 6, 2018

Quilt & Stitch Show - Osaka, Japan: November 8 - 10, 2018

Quilt & Stitch Show - Nagoya, Japan: March 28 - 30, 2019

Crosstown Arts – Memphis, Tennessee: May 10 - July 28, 2019

11th Asia Quilt Festival - Shanghai, China: September 20 - 22, 2019

Max Berk Textile Museum, Palatinate Museum (Textilsammlung Max Berk / Kurpfälzisches Museum) - Heidelberg, Germany: February 16, 2020 - June 21, 2020. 

Original Sewing & Quilt Expo - Raleigh, North Carolina: July 20 - August 1, 2020

Original Sewing & Quilt Expo - Arlington, Texas: August 27 - 29, 2020

Original Sewing & Quilt Expo - Cincinnati, Ohio: September 17 - 19, 2020

Original Sewing & Quilt Expo - Fredericksburg, Virginia: October 8 - 10, 2020

Original Sewing & Quilt Expo - Novi, Michigan: November 12 - 14, 2020

Nice to know that my quilts get to travel to places where I have never been. That is a confirmation of the line of reasoning which was used on the document I received with my City of Vilsbiburg Cultural Award last year, “the international recognition she receives”. Yeah, a blow in my trumpet!

And a few others of my quilts are traveling, the reduced output I have managed last year has been well received. There is ‘Everyone has the right’ in the Forced to Flee exhibition, you can check the calendar here http://www.saqa.com/memberArt.php?cat=8&ec=3&ex=94, and there is “Here Comes the Sun”, currently in France.

I am also showing two quilts at Festival of Quilts this very weekend, namely “A Scrap a Day” 

and “Girl Power”. And I got interviewed for the Bernina blog about “A Scrap a Day”, so if I am lucky there will be an episode about that on the blog or channel or whatever medium they choose in the near future when editing is done. Ta taa….

Test Drive for Prague

During the last weeks I have felt a bit like the frog who jumped into the jug of cream and is now paddling around like mad, waiting for the cream to turn into butter so that it can get out of the mess it got itself into...
I am hoping that, once I return from the Prague Patchwork Meeting AND the workshop that Kathy Loomis will be teaching here will be over, my butter will have settled!
Part of the density of it all - to be honest, a very large part - is the involvement with the refugees, which has been taking much more time than I knew I had still at my disposal... Three to five hours of one-on-one German lessons per week is fun, because my student is very studious, very eager to learn and a wonderful person to get to know. But add to that regular visits to their house (and you can't just stop by and leave again after a brief chat, you have to spend time if you don't want to be rude or inconsiderate), arranging appointments for doctor's visits and accompanying them for translation, picking somebody up at the hospital, enrolling a child in kindergarten ...
And there was still stuff to prepare for the Prague Patchwork Meeting. Where I will be going next week to accompany the first exhibition of International Threads, but I will also be demonstrating at the Bernina stand, and teaching a half-day workshop. So I had to make sure that everything I need for the demonstration is ready to the point where I can just talk about and show what I do when I do what I will be demonstrating. For this, a certain amount of preparations was necessary - made more difficult by the fact that a) I don't know the type of machine on which I will have to do the demonstrations, and b) my own machine is away for maintenance, again, so the preparations had to be done on my old Bernina.

text messages 7, in progress

This machine does take this thicker thread -
but will the one in Prague as well...?

Which worked out fine, I think I am all set, but it was a tense time... What I don't have yet, and won't be able to finish any more before I leave on Thursday, is a handout for the half-day workshop. People will actually have to take notes on what I am saying. I hope they can manage that!
And I managed to finish the pages which we want to display at the exhibition, today. Before being able to do that, I had to get my husband to take my photo, because all the ones I had were very out of date, and every attempt at taking a 'selfie' returned unsatisfactory results!

What I could not finish today was printing out the signs of quilt names to be added to our display, because one of the members of the group (I'm not giving a name here!) managed to forget to send me the last two titles of quilts she was still finishing as we were compiling the list for insurance values, on which I was going to base the signs. So that will have to wait until Tuesday afternoon, when I return from a two-day-visit to my parents, together with my family. Just as well that we are going by train - let's just hope the German railway system is up to its former high standards and does not present us with surprises!
So the frog is still paddling. But it hasn't drowned yet, there is hope for the butter.

Getting acquainted.

It’s been two months now that I have had my new sewing machine, the Bernina 820. Pretty much right after it arrived I went away for ten days of teaching and selling fabrics. That was followed by a frantic week of dyeing the May-collection of my fabric club. 

Selection for fabric club, May 2012

So I did not really have much time to sit down and try out all those interesting features of the ‘sewing computer’, as it is called in the instruction manual.

Then followed two weeks of our family holiday on the island of Föhr. Basically I did not get around to sitting down and getting to know that new wonder of wonders until just a couple of weeks ago. And what I really would like to do, namely sit down with the instruction manual for a couple of days and work my way through all the different kinds of programmes, is not possible right now, but will have to wait until after the show in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines. So this current stage feels a bit like driving a Porsche without having had more than one driving lesson...

But I am learning. I have completely pieced “Play of Lines XXXI” and was very satisfied with the machine’s performance.

Play of Lines XXXI, before quilting

Although I was a bit worried for a little while because it kept showing me this little picture on the computer screen:

The instruction manual had lots of little pictures listed, but not this particular one. Searching the Bernina website did not help, either, and my Bernina dealer did not reply to my email of inquiry for a number of days. Barbara Lange suggested that it was the indication that the machine had realized that I was using a different foot and that it warned me not to put it into zigzag mode – which must be correct, because I was indeed using the walking foot at that time.

By now I think I have almost figured out how to use the automatic needle threader. The average number of attempts needed for successful threading is slowly going down. Sometimes it does not find the eye of the needle, sometimes it finds the eye, but pulls out the thread again right away when retreating. Sometimes it does work on first try, though.

This past week I have actually embarked on the first major quilting project, finishing Play of Lines XXVIII. This is the quilt that had really sparked the whole machine trouble with the Janome, because the thread had kept breaking. So I was pleasantly surprised at the ease with which free motion quilting progressed on the Bernina. The stitch regulator may need a more intensive phase of experimenting for me to feel as if I have really mastered it, but it worked. No more than three thread breakages on a quilted surface that measures almost six by six feet, can’t complain about that.

In the process of being quilted: Play of Lines XXVIII,
behind the machine

Play of Lines XXVIII, detail

I have made sure to be very good about cleaning out dust from the bobbin case whenever I put in a new bobbing, but after finishing this major free motion quilting project, the machine complained quite a bit and kept telling me that the “lower thread surveillance” had discovererd some error, please check or rewind. Every two to five inches it would beep, flash that little sign, and stop. Can’t count how many times I opened the case, took out the bobbin, cleaned again...

But I finally seem to have got it all out, and then spent another day quilting Play of Lines XXXI, with the walking foot this time. It almost feels like I have entered the finishing straight. Not quite there yet, there are still several other UFOs hanging around which need to get finished before September 13, but I might actually make it.

Waiting is over, finally.

It should have happened Thursday. At least that was the original day set up for my tutorial on my new Bernina 820. On short notice (Thursday morning) that got pushed back another day, and it all happened on Friday afternoon. Luckily my husband was able to push around all his appointments, make time to take care of my son when he returned home from school, so I could take off.

The Bernina expert, Frau Popp, had come to my dealer to make all the arrangements for him to be re-listed as official Bernina-dealer, and I got my personal introduction to the machine from her. Very nicely she ‘took me by the hand’ and virtually walked me through every single step and possibility that the machine offers. The whole event took over two hours, and in the end I thought I had it all down safely.

Of course that wasn’t quite true as I found out today when I unpacked and tried my hand at it on my own. It is a sewing computer, and computers do take getting used to at first.

Unpacking...

Now how did you have to thread that bobbin which comes without a bobbin case? Which icon on the touchscreen is for what? Wasn’t there a feature where you could do this magnificent thing...? I practised threading the top thread – closely watched by my 7-year-old son who kept giving wise comments and nagging me when could he try it out by himself – and tried out quite a number of the fancy stitches that come along with this edition, although it does not have the embroidery feature that the 830 has.

Only a small selection of the many fancy stitches.

But the best of it all is the BSR-foot. BSR stands for Bernina Stitch Regulator, and is a wonderful little item that regulates the stitch length of your quilting stitches because an integrated sensor (with an extra connection to the computer part) detects the speed of movement of the fabric and adapts the speed of stitching accordingly. And it seems to work quite nicely – these are stitches of an absolute beginner on the machine, executed this afternoon:

We still need to get to know each other better, but I am very positive that this is going to turn into a good relationship!

While waiting...

I’m still waiting for the new sewing machine, which is supposed to appear in my life sometime next week. Until then, I don’t want to sit idle, of course, and finished sewing another top, part 4 of the series “Shapes”.

By now I have realized that starting that file with a list of the finished quilts has been a vitally important idea in my preparations for Ste. Marie-aux-Mines. While I’m still not finished, at least I feel like I am beginning the see the silver lining on the horizon – counting 26, 27... However, I can’t just spend two weeks relaxing, and so after finishing the top yesterday I started quilting Play of Lines XXX today, with my little Bernina 930. This means that I had to choose another style of quilting than I had originally planned for, before the sewing machine drama took over. But assuming that getting aqcuainted with the new one might take a bit longer, I just didn’t want to take the risk of running into tights timewise and have opted to quilt Play of Lines XXX with the well known parallel lines. They work well, even if they are not as orginal as I would have wanted the quilting to be, and they can be done on this little machine with relative ease.

Except for the fact that the spools of my new threads don’t fit onto the machine. I did use some colors of my ‘old’ threads that had given me so many problems on the Janome, which fit fine onto the Bernina – and which didn’t break! – but in order to achieve a bit of variety I also wanted to include some of the newly bought threads as well. Then I remembered that Kathy Loomis had once written something about a ‘budget version’ for a spool stand on her blog. I couldn’t find the entry quickly to set a direct link, but I remembered enough to start fiddling with various materials in the house, included some hints once received by Barbara Lange about dealing with tension issues on older machines, and came up with this solution: the large cone is deposited in a plastic container, positioned right behind the motor of the machine,

and the thread is first led through the metal clip-parts of this large clip of which I don’t even remember the German name. 

Then threading continues normally, and voilá –

Play of Lines XXX - quilting in progress

slowly working along.

Waiting.

„To stay in one place or remain inactive in expectation (of something); hold oneself in readiness (for something).“ This is how my monolingual dictionary of English defines the word “wait”. The act of waiting is perhaps not too hard when you know that whatever you are waiting for is really bound to happen, and the approximate point of time is know, as with the flowering of the tulips.

April 12

April 19

April 21

Waiting is probably slightly more difficult if you don’t really know that whatever you are waiting for is actually going to happen, and the difficulties are bound to rise if you don’t know whether it is going to happen at all. Philosophy probably has a lot more to say about this. (Interestingly enough, the definition for “waiting” which I found in my German dictionary when preparing the German version of this post includes a passage about the fact that time until fulfilment tends to feel like dragging on forever, which is not at all mentioned in the English version. But I did not look in more than one dictionary each.)

So what about the kind of waiting when you don’t even really know that you are indeed waiting for something, not to mention what you are waiting for and when ...? That is a little bit how I feel these days, after receiving a message a little more than a week ago, from the organizers of the quilt festival Carrefour in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines.

For years I have debating with myself whether I should offer myself the luxury of buying one of those big machines by Bernina which have all that space for quilting. At first there had been rumours, but when it hit the market I was, I have to admit, overwhelmed by the costs involved. Also, I did not want to have all the embroidery stuff that came with the first model of the 830.

When the 820 followed a little later, I still held back due to the financial reasons. That is the one thing I regret about giving up my university career – I don’t get paid well anymore, and luxury buys have to be considered carefully... My savings from teaching patchwork workshops didn’t cover for a Bernina 820. So when the Janome Horizon appeared on the market two years ago I immediately thought that was my chance. By now I’ve learned that that didn’t really happen. But the money is gone, and everything else I had saved went into starting my fabric club and hand-dyed fabrics business.

With all that mounting frustration about machine quilting and Janome during the last weeks, I did indeed have the feeling that I was waiting for something cataclysmic – throwing the thing out of the window (with a lot of energy!), or that I would give it all up entirely and return to the spinning wheel or whatever. But as mentioned above – I did not really know what it was that I was waiting for.

My husband finally got entirely fed up with me and my mounting frustration and urged me to go ahead and order the 820. (He would have wanted me to get it even two years ago, when I made that other mistake.) He would not listen to my argument that we couldn’t afford it, pointed out that the tax advisor had told us we could expect a bit of a refund, and told me to inquire from friends who have it how satisfied they were.

This has happended, and those reports turned out mostly positive, at worst claiming a “needs getting used to”. 

In early April we then visited my mother-in-law for her birthday, and when she heard about the problem, she immediately offered that she would be happy to help us with the amount needed.

There followed a phone call with my local sewing machine dealer, who was currently negotiating with Bernina about being included in the list of official Bernina dealers anyway. He promised he would call me back with an offer, and more information whether he would be able to take the other machine, which was away for those repairs I’ve been lamenting about, as part payment. And while I was waiting for his call that message from Carrefour arrived, which I have mentioned above: the news that Bernina International had agreed to act as sponsor for my exhibit in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines in September! Which, of course, is fantastic news, and then in the context of buying the new machine...

Now I don’t know whether it was exactly this that I was waiting for, but will find out within the next few days when this emotionally charged weeks subsides.

In any case, I did not know that I was waiting for this, though when looking at all the connections it does seem plausible. Now I can easily wait until the machine arrives and I will get my introductory lesson, and to tie me over I will just take out my little ‘old’ Bernina 930 and sew with that one. 

Machine quilting and I – the next instalment

I have already given a couple of descriptions of my attempts at becoming a more versatile machine quilter. However, the story is not over yet.

The last report ended on a slightly positive note, there was a silver lining on the horizon after I had set myself an organized and systematic manner of approaching the task. For example, when I was waiting somewhere or riding the train I started doodling to find out how the eye follows the line, and perhaps to develop own patterns as well – i.e. I was really getting into machine quilting mood and mode.

So far, so good. Very quickly, however, severe frustration set in. Constant breaking of the thread was driving me wild.

Attempts at changing the tension or even the foot-type were in vain. The thread kept breaking.

Consultations with friends and quilting experts such as Bonnie Bucknam and Leah Day pointed to a possible reason, namely that the thread was too old. After three years?

Too old after three years? Can't really believe it...

In any case, I ordered another type of threads (which also required buying a special spool stand for large cones). I also tried a different kind of foot, assuming that this one would give the fabric a firmer hold, thus causing less disturbance:

Still, the thread kept breaking, and again the left-out stitches occurred, which had been the reason for that first trip to the retailer in December.

So I sent the machine back to the store again, getting not only slightly annoyed by this time.

Several phone calls later, including one with an employee of the store who was trying out the machine and admitted she did not do machine quilting herself, and having sent them my thread as well, and after 10 days, I got the machine back last Monday. They told me that they could not find any problems, that the pressure of the foot had been adjusted slightly, and it was all my fault.

I waited for a day before unpacking, but yesterday I thought it was time to give it another try, using all the settings and foot pressure they had sent it with. This is the result of the very first attempt, after a length of less than 4 inches:

Mark: These are the new threads! That’s when “my thread of patience broke”, as the saying in German goes. I could have thrown it out the window, but instead I cried.

Right after the machine had gone on its new tour I had already talked with my local sewing machine dealer who had been taking care of my machines before I made this mistake of buying out of town, being blinded by the light, so to say. And yesterday I got his offer for a new Bernina 820, and he will give me a very decent trade-in for this other machine.

So perhaps the whole story will take a positive ending after all.

And then, I am certain, those other threads will get their next chance, and I am pretty certain they will live up to the challenge.

Half closed seams

While I have been waiting for my larger machine to return from the repair shop I returned to my old, reliable and trustworthy Bernina to start piecing the top of Play of Lines XXX. The design had been developed a couple of weeks ago, but I had assumed I would be quilting Play of Lines XXIX first, before I would start on this one.

All of the Play of Lines quilts – well, at least the ones created with paper templates –use a technique that I call “half closed seams”. And as No. XXX had lots of them, I thought I would give a short documentation of how one particular part of the design developed using this technique. In my teaching I have discovered that it is far less well-known than I had assumed.

I first encountered half closed seams when I first tried to sew a pattern derived from old wooden paneling:

I use half closed seams in situations like these:

This detail shows a part of the design where several lines cross over (and under) each other. In order to achieve this effect in piecing – and I am a true believer in piecing, no fusing here! no appliqué! – you can’t just slap one piece onto the other.

Here is the same detail with fabrics cut out already.

First step: sew three pieces together, so that the left side is a ‚full length’ to which another piece can be added. However, the seams between these three pieces are not closed entirely, but a piece of about two and a half inches remains open on the right side, i.e. the seam is closed only partially:

Then another piece can be added onto the length that is made up of the three pieces, and this piece can indeed be added in its full length.

Here you can see a back view of the next piece added, partially:

Which leads to another longer piece that can be added onto:

And so on and on:

There comes a point when each individual seam can or must be closed completely so that another full length is reached in order for other pieces....

During the entire process of piecing Play of Lines XXX I did encounter a new situation, though, which had not happened to me before: I had a basically finished top with just a hole in the middle that was closed last.

But it all fit together nicely in the end.

This is the finished top.