UFO for Mayan families

Inbetween finishing the last piece for the exhibition in and actually leaving for Freiburg there were a few days that seemed a bit less packed. I had already started on the next pieces in the Shapes series while I was waiting for the threads with which I had wanted to finish Shapes 10, and certainly could have continued working on that. But I also felt an urge to start preparing for a class that will begin in the end of the month. So I figured it would make sense to clear out and put away the contents of the box that had been traveling back and forth with me to the Log Cabin class I taught at the community college in Landshut last fall. That way the box would be ready to hold materials for the next class.

When teaching Log Cabin, I always sew a few blocks myself – partly for the demonstration, partly when the students are busy and I wouldn’t have anything else to do but walk around making them nervous by constantly looking over their shoulder.

Last fall’s results were part of what came out of that box. I sort of had forgotten about these blocks... When I counted them, I thought they were too many to just let them sit around somewhere waiting for another Log Cabin class. So I  made six more blocks, 

sewed them together, found a backing,

you will have to forgive the lighting -
the picture was taken late at night under my studio lights.

and sent it all off to Bonnie Bucknam for her Quilts for Mayan Families project (for which I had donated a piece already last year).

Felt good to be able to do something like that so quickly – not counting the hours which I had spent in the fall...

Bonnie in reply sent me some pictures of the quilt I sent last year, now quilted and finished:

While I was finishing the Log Cabin blocks, my son was working on another UFO, from the results of demonstrating the technique of fast half-square triangles. He has claimed that it was his turn to be the recipient of a  quilt, and (to keep him occupied) I had enlisted his help: arrange them the way you want them, so we can figure out how many more we need. A few weeks ago he had started with the first attempt, 

but now he has changed his mind and wants a “barn raising” arrangement. 

working on arranging the first quarter

It will be a little while before it is completely finished. But it's on its way.

In the mail: Parquet-top for Mayan families

During the fall I taught a sort of traditionally oriented patchwork class based on old parquet patterns. The class was initiated by a pattern book that my husband gave me as a present a few years ago, and had been ‘in the making’ since then. But as the Germans say, “Gut Ding will Weile haben” (good things may take a while), the class was fun, the students were pleased, and the outcomes were interesting.

Only last week one of the participants, who had only been quilting for a little over a year when she took part in the class, proudly showed me her result. And right she is to be proud of what she has achieved.

Because the class had been in close proximity to the exhibit in Alsace I myself had only produced samples of the various patterns that were on the agenda, and hadn’t finished a complete quilt. However, I decided that I would use a little packet of assorted Oakshott fabrics in combination with my stash to work a top for Bonnie Bucknam’s charity project. She has already made one hundred quilts for the children in an orphanage in Guatemala and is now making more quilts to give to Mayan families in the area. I had finished the top before Christmas, but waited to send it off until the Christmas rush is over. It’s in the mail now, and I do hope it will arrive at Bonnie’s safe and sound:

After that top, I made a little quilt for the German Guild’s challenge “Checkered Fish” which will be showing at the British Guild’s AGM in Nottingham (UK) in April.

My way of dealing with the fabrics that were called "checkered fish"
by the German Guild, detail of unfinished quilt

A week after the AGM, a slightly abbreviated version of the parquet class will be held in Newcastle for region 15. Please contact me and I will gladly supply you with a contact address for more information in case you are interested. Before that, a full weekend parquet-workshop is scheduled in (almost) northern Germany in March, on the weekend of March 22-24, in Alfeld (between Göttingen and Hannover, roughly speaking). Several spots are still available, and I could easily do bilingual teaching German/English. In case you are interested, please contact me and I will get you in touch with Mary, who organizes it all.

"Color Improvisation" and Nancy Crow's Self-Portraits opened in Neumünster

My trip to Neumünster was strenuous and not without delays, but I won’t go into that. The textile museum Tuch + Technik  is a wonderful presentation of the history and development of spinning, weaving, in combination with the local history of Neumünster, which was once called the “Sheffield of Schleswig-Holstein”. And it is a wonderful venue for the many large quilts of “Color Improvisation”.

View over the museum hall when entering

Two of Marina Kamenskaya's four quilts

Randa Stewens, Uta Lenk,
and Kathy Loomis in the background

Bonnie Bucknam

Nancy Cordry, and Leslie Riley in the background

Uta Lenk, Jayne Willoughby Scott,
and Cathy Shanahan in the background

Some of the quilts are hung on a system that makes it possible for the viewers to take closer looks at the back sides. Which definitely give very interesting sights with some of the quilts, e.g. this one by Jayne Willoughby Scott. Seeing the quilting pattern on the back side certainly adds to the pleasure of having seen the front!

Jayne Willoughby Scott, back of "Nightdrawing 14"

Jayne Willoughby Scott, Nightdrawing 14

The second part of the exhibition is dedicated to the newest quilts by Nancy Crow, who has started on a completely new path a little more than a year ago, when she began making mono-prints.

As I already mentioned in my last post, Nancy Crow’s name is presented prominently on the front of the flyer, suggesting that this is the more important part of the exhibition. The same was true for the opening speech by Claire Benn, http://www.committedtocloth.com/ who had flown in from London to open the exhibit on Nancy’s behalf. She barely mentioned the other fifty quilts that were hanging throughout the museum.

Because I had written an article on this ‚coming exhibition’ for the journal of the German Patchworkgilde in September, for which I had received pictures of Nancy’s quilts, I knew sort of what to expect in terms of different style of quilts and color.

However, when I recall what I learned in Nancy’s classes about colors, design, composition and unity of the whole arrangement, I admit that I was not terribly impressed with some of these quilts.

I admire the guts that Nancy has to be starting on such a completely new venture by taking on a new technique, and I am convinced that it will be very interesting to follow her development. Claire Benn said in her speech: „And then I tell my students ‚now get to work, and do at least a hundred of these.’ Nancy is exceptional in that she did.“

But even a well-known artist perhaps need not exhibit all of these hundred first attempts as accomplished pieces of art. Of these four quilts in the picture, the one in the lower right hand corner carries the number 97.

Nancy Crow, Self-Portraits

While I was looking at the exhibit, it was the only one that I really found worth looking at in more detail, and that I could relate to in some manner. With most of the others I did not connect easily. When looking at the picture now, I do think the two white and black ones are also worth looking at, this seems to be an effect of the zooming onto picture size, though, they certainly did not appear clear or understandable to me when I was standing in front of them. 

It will be interesting to see numbers 100 and up, because I am sure Nancy has a lot to say through printing.

The exhibit is on until March 10, 2013, and the museum is within walking distance of the train station in Neumünster.

Color Improvisations in Neumünster

I have packed my bag and am planning to hop onto the train early tomorrow morning to attend the opening of  the double show of Color Improvisations and fifteen quilts by Nancy Crow in Neumünster, north of Hamburg.

There has been a bit of a discussion on the Contemporary Group of QGBI's yahoo list about the recent showings of this exhibition in London (badly hung) and Dublin (wonderfully hung) and how the advertisement with a provenance of the name "Nancy Crow" had influenced visitors' expectations.
Margaret Cooter commented on this on her blog with some interesting thoughts, weighing carefully between the arguments for either side.
It is an interesting topic. I don't know how the advertisement for the two shows in England and Ireland was constructed. But when I received my invitation for the opening at the Tuch + Technik Museum, I of course immediately noticed that the quilt on the front of the flyer was one of the three quilts by Bonnie Bucknam in the show, while the prominently displayed name was that of Nancy Crow.

Now I happen to know some things about how the show came about, and how difficult it was to find appropriate places to show it - 50 large quilts need some space, after all! - because Nancy Crow's original intention was to show it only in art museums. As a matter of fact, it was my suggestion to Ginie Curtze to try at Tuch + Technik that secured this last stop in Europe before the show is supposed to go overseas.
I think it is quite justifiable to combine these two shows, especially since they are closely connected through the person of Nancy Crow - she is the initiator and curator of Color Improvisations, which shows quilts by her students from several countries, and of course she is a famous quilter herself. If museums and organizers of shows demand some additional attraction that will catch people's attention after Color Improvisations has been traveling for more than two years, that is quite understandable and acceptable. It's just a case of negligent editing that the flyer combines Bonnie's quilt with Nancy's name.
Does the name of the artist affect a viewer's perception of a piece of art? Of course it does - but that does not necessarily mean that this will be the same in every viewer. I openly admit that I was not terribly impressed with Mona Lisa when I saw the painting in the Louvre - no matter who painted it, and how many people think differently. On the other hand, I was really impressed with several of the works I saw in the Global Paper exhibition in Deggendorf, that I went to without knowing more about it than that it was supposed to be an interesting exhibit, and although I really only knew three of the names of artists on display (and one of the three turned out to be a doppelgänger). One of my most favorite quilts was made by an anonymous slave. All it requires is to keep an open mind. Great names may promise great stuff,
but no-names can certainly create great stuff as well.
In any case, I am looking forward to my trip. Let's just hope German Railways can cope with the fact that it is snowing...

Activities after France

So what have I been doing since I returned from France?

I went through the final preparations for and taught the workshop “Parquet and Patchwork” that I have posted about here.

I have been practising the piano a lot more than during the last year, which I hope my teacher will notice when I go to have my lesson next week... I made tons of quince jam and apple sauce as the garden season is coming to an end and last harvest activities need to take place.

I finally had an idea for a tight spot I had got myself into in May. When in Einbeck I saw that the German Patchwork Guild was having a little challenge for members to make a quilt 70 x70 cm, using pieces of two given fabrics that the president had brought with her from a trip to Malaysia. The quilts are to be shown for the first time at the AGM of the British Quilters’ Guild in Nottingham in April, and since I am also going to be there, teaching, I had figured I better get me one of those little packages. However, I had absolutely not counted on the kind of quilter’s block I would get upon looking at the fabrics. These are the two fabrics that were inside the package.

The package was called “checkered fish”, and somehow I got hooked on that combination – how do I do a checkered fish, do I really want to do that... But my idea came when I was thinking about the fact that I myself still had not done more in the parquet-style than sew the few samples for the workshop. Forget the checkered fish, just do a little parquet pattern using the fabrics.

This is the pattern I will use to make the quilt.

So I made plastic templates. Usually I cover up the numbers on the templates with scotch tape to prevent the mark rubbing off.

And this is the state of the project at this minute: pieces are cut, waiting to be sewn together, and then I will figure out how to do the border, although I do have an idea for that already.

These are the leftovers of the two required fabrics – I think I did use enough of them to meet the challenge requirements indeed.

So have I been doing a bit of sewing, too, or is the new machine just sitting there idly?

In spring I had seen on Bonnie Bucknam’s blog that she has started a continuation of her “100 quilts for an orphanage in Guatemala” project which she calls “Quilts for MayanFamilies” .

I had promised her I would make at least one top, but I had announced that I would not get started on it until after the exhibition in France.

Which I did during the parquet workshop – I started cutting the pieces for a quilt that would meet the size requirements, also a parquet pattern. In fact, it’s the first practice pattern that I used to get participants started, getting them acquainted with the half sewn seams.

This is how far I had got with the sewing before I had to start cutting some more pieces:

Which I have done, even sewn them together partly already, but I don’t have a picture of that stage yet.

And after these, I will return to Play of Lines and Shapes, I am sure.

First anniversary of writing a blog

Towards the end of my former life as a linguist I witnessed a lot of discussion about the textual qualities of so-called „Hypertexts”. There was quite some dissent about the fact whether they were texts at all, or whether they qualified as ‘literature’. After all, they did not appear in print, thus would never have a definite and final form such as a last edition, they could be continuously altered, and different readers might read them in a different order, thus they would never be able to have a similar reading experience of the ‚same text’. At that time, being on the way out of linguistics, I did not really pay a lot of attention to those discussions, nor did I take hypertexts seriously. I thought they were a soon-to-disappear fad. A couple of years later I heard that people had started writing blogs, and had a hard time understanding what that was – nor could I really grasp why somebody would want to write an “internet diary” for public readership, as they were sometimes called in German.

In 2008 Jayne Willoughby Scott told me during a conversation at Nancy Crow’s farm that she had heard of the advice to artists that they should certainly write a blog for potential customers or followers. Still, I wondered whoever would sit down and read that. Then Bonnie Bucknam

started writing a blog on her Guatemala-bound-project (and let me know about it) and I started reading it sort of regularly. Through this blog I discovered others, such as the interesting and well-written blog by former journalist Kathy Loomis or the very instructive blog on 365 patterns for machine quilting, and I finally began to realize that it could be fun reading other people’s blogs, and that it might actually make sense to write one’s own.

So when I started preparations for my fabric-club for hand-dyed fabrics just about a year ago I knew I wanted to combine that with a blog that related to my dyeing experiences, and the various shipments of the club. Accordingly, the first posts on my German blog were all fabric-club-related.

Parallel I wanted to let my international friends and contacts who do not know any German know about what was going on in my quilting life. However, for ease of reading I did not want to write a bilingual blog. So I decided that the German blog would be more dyeing-oriented (in principle), and the English blog more concerned with my various experiences with art – my own, and art by others. I figured that would make it more interesting for me, too, because I feared that always writing the sort of same text in two languages would become boring for me. So you can find different types of entries on my two different blogs, although they do coincide every once in a while. For example, my Daily Art Projekt „Daily Oak“ appears only on the English blog.

Slowly the number of registered followers grew – to my husband’s surprise. Not surprised at the fact that the number grew slowly, but that anybody would care to read what I was writing about... Meanwhile he, too, has bookmarked the site and  has turned into an occasional reader.

Over the year I slowly got acquainted with the different types of functions that blogger provides. Most likely I still don’t know about all of them, but it’s always good to have something left to discover. Already after six months I realized that it was possible to save posts for a later publication. Which is nice if you want to keep a possible gap due to absence with uncertain access to the internet at a minimum, but can be rather stressful if you have to prepare and write several posts in advance.

I’m still learning what it means to write a blog, too. What is a good topic – would this be interesting enough to let others read about this? Do I really have something interesting or noteworthy to say about this? ... But I have found that it is a motivation to educate oneself about some topics that I might not have tackled or bothered about, had I not been writing a blog.

During the workshop in Falera I realized for the first time that there are actually people out there reading my blog who have not registered themselves as followers, when some people started talking to me about some of the posts. And in August blogger changed their design for writing. I am somebody who is rather slow in embracing changes in relation to computer stuff, once I have got myself used to one design, but I tried out their new design pretty much immediately. So I discovered that it was possible to view statistics of how may people have looked at a blog on a particular day. What a surprise – there were actually quite a number of people out there reading my blog! A chart of the number of readers throughout the last week might look like this:

It does matter – seeing these charts did have an effect on how I feel about writing my blogs (not that I didn’t care before, but to see that people actually do read it is a really nice feeling). So at this point I would like to thank all of you out there who care enough to check out once in a while what I have to tell. It’s good to know you are out there! 

I myself am curious as to how this blog is going to develop, I am certain that there are still a lot of topics out there that will catch my attention at some point. Looking forward to new postings...

Daily Art Project as a Dialogue: Daily Mail

I started reading Kathleen Loomis' blog just about a year ago. I'd met Kathy for the first time at a Masters Composition Class at Nancy Crow's barn in Ohio in 2008. At that time I had been filled awe and respect about her work - after all, she was the first person ever to machine quilt one of Nancy Crow's quilts! At the barn, I got to work on the table next to Kathy, and although we were both caught up in our own work, we had enough time to look at what the other was doing, and I was really impressed with the pieces Kathy was working on, and also with the way Kathy was talking about her art.
After that, we had a few contacts by e-mail, and finally found out that we were both going to be part of Color Improvisations, soon opening at Karlsruhe, Germany.
A few weeks before the first opening of Color Improvisations in Stuttgart on July 12, 2011, I then found out about Kathy's blog via a hunt from Bonnie Bucknam and, not having had any real experience with blogs before, started reading it backwards. Slowly I made my way back to January when she had started writing it, reading a few entries every time I had a chance. About two weeks before the opening in Stuttgart I had finally found out how Kathy got started on her Art-a-Day project, which she regularly posted about, and which had had a most inspiring effect on me. Knowing that I would meet Kathy in Stuttgart a thought occurred to me which then slowly evolved over the next two weeks: what would it be like for two people to join in such a daily art project in an exchange? What kind of dialogue would it turn into?
It took me a lot of courage to tell Kathy about this idea at all because I was a little bit afraid she would think I would be trying to steal her idea. But it turned out she was very open to my initial suggestions, and within less than a complete half hour we had come up with a handwritten "contract" about our joint project which would be called "Daily Mail":

'Contract' for joint "Daily Mail Project",
signed July 10, 2011

Starting on September 15, 2011, we would commit for a period of six months, each of us sending the other one an e-mail every day, with either a picture, or a piece of text, or a little explanation. Themes were allowed to develop.
During the two months between our signing of the agreement and the actual beginning I started taking many more pictures than I ever had before, trying to stock up on pictures because I was slightly afraid that at some point I might actually run out of current pictures to send. Little did I know about the dynamics that this project would get caught up in!
I was lucky early on, too, to find two instances of a motif  that made it possible to open and end the project with a pun on Kathy's blog title "Art with a Needle", as I could name them "Art with a Noodle":

Daily Mail, September 15: Art with a Noodle

 Living in Europe means that I was six hours ahead of Kathy, and I got to start first.
Early on I sent a picture of our local cemetery - which got Kathy started on a long though intermittent row of cemeteries from all over the world:

Daily Mail September 16: Cemetery

 And that was only the beginning of it all.

See future posts for further reports on the project, and read about Kathy's side of the story here!