Nottingham, first day

With my visit to Nottingham I was rather lucky with QGBI’s planning: all my teaching was done on one – the first! – day, after which I was finished and could simply enjoy the atmosphere at the meeting, meet a lot of people, and enrich my scanty knowledge of British culture by immersion.

We had breakfast in the university’s Atrium, which, of course, reminded me about being a student at the university myself many many years ago.

Returning your food trays, and the system is breaking down...

After the grand opening of the weekend on Friday morning, at which we were greeted by Morris dancers (I am not quite sure about the spelling here...) and by Robin Hood and his lovely Lady Mariam in person

I went to find my workshop room, which had been changed last minute in the morning. Fifteen people were enrolled in the workshop, everybody appeared on time, and we had a heavy workload ahead of us. The workshop I taught was an abbreviated version of my “IQ – from inspiration to quilt”, which I had originally conceived of as a two-day workshop. So this one-day set-up consituted quite an experiment – the class is a full class, and I did not know beforehand whether the cuts had been made at the right points, and how this would really work.

I think it did.

Even the larger room was a tight fit with fifteen students,
but we managed fine.

Assuming that every student knew how to do free-hand cutting, I showed them my quilts as they appear in my eternal calendar, explaining how the different techniques yielded vastly results, even when using the same inspirational picture. After that we dove into the process of making the individually crafted paper templates that I frequently work with, based on a small design that was supposed to show the workshop participants the usefulness and applicability of my little technical trick, the half-closed seam. And in the afternoon they started to work on their own inspirational pictures, although there was only enough time for a beginning approach. Of course, it would have been nice to give the students enough working time so they could see the effects - and pitfalls! – of the technique when applied to their own intended design. But they were able to get through the entire process of template making once, I did point out to them the possible difficulties when leaving out one of the vital components in the process, such as forgetting to put a grid on the back of the templates before cutting them up, or the necessity to add further sewing lines at some points. So I do hope that they went home with a sound basic knowledge of what it is they can do when using the kind of paper templates I work with, and that they will put it to use in their own work.

Despite the fact that I was very tired in the evening I went to listen to Anja Townrow’s talk on her development as a quilter. Good that I did, it was such a show! I don’t think any quilter in Germany would have the guts to stand up in front of so many people and talk so humorously and unconceitedly about herself. 

Anja Townrow, detail of one of her fabulous foundation pieded
and appliqued quilts

Anja uses freezer paper for her many curves and perfect points and produces stunning results in terms of technical perfection and sewing, with appliqué added on top for additional effects.

Freezer paper is not available in supermarkets in Germany, so I had never thought about applying it to my technique of template making. You can get it in quilt shops, though, at the corresponding prices, but I don’t want to spend a fortune on freezer paper. Though it might be worth considering whether an adaptation of my technique is practicable or desirable, and I will certainly do a little bit more thinking about that, at the moment I think using freezer paper is just an additional step in the process. One would have to trace the worksheet onto the freezer paper, and that would slow me down. I do make sure I take a picture of the paper before I cut it up into templates, I have added enough information for orientation on the individual pieces to get them back into place, and as the freezer must be removed before joining the pieces, which need to be pinned nevertheless, I don’t actually see an advantage in using freezer paper for the kind of designs I work with.

I do see that it has a distinct advantage when using it for foundation piecing, though!

Last workshop of the year

Just recently I returned from teaching my last two-day workshop this year. Now there are only two more evening session of the beginners’ class I am teaching here in my town left, and then the teaching will be over for this year. (But I will get to be a student for four and a half days myself next week...) This last workshop was another instance of my class „IQ – from inspiration to quilt“, a workshop that I originally called “Quilts from children’s drawings”.

As I have taught this workshop a number of times over the past year now, I decided that I wanted to change the order of assignments a little bit. Participants are still asked to bring their inspirational picture from which they will eventually work. However, the workshop begins with technical assignments. Through these, the participants get acquainted with the various techniques that I use for my own work, and can develop their own opinion as to which of these they particularly like, or which might be less useful for an attempt with their own picture.

At first participants insert a full circle into a piece of fabric, then have to cut through that insert with free hand rotary cutting in several ways, and take their first attempts with my new little tool.

After that I demonstrate my method of making paper templates. 

Making individual templates

And then they get to work on their own design.

I do believe that mastery of techniques is a very important step on the way to the development of an own design, and pay a lot of attention to these in my teaching. For me personally, participation in a workshop nowadays means that I want to learn the technique in order to be able to then work with it at home and figure out whether it will be useful for my work. I notice, however, that this approach is not shared by most participants in my workshops. They often want to produce something “useful”, want to leave by the end of the two days with a visible result. They find it hard to embrace the idea that what they are sewing in the workshop might not turn out to be anything beyond the piece through which they got acquainted with a new technique.

It is interesting and challenging to see (and accompany) how participants approach the difficult problem of developing an own design. For many, the picture they bring, however, seems to be more of a hindrance than a starting point to development. Mostly, because they want to simply put the picture into fabric, as closely as possible, have difficulties of entering into a process of abstraction. Instead, my approach is that an inspiration is always just that – an inspiration to move on from there, through lots of abstractions, fragmentation, perhaps turning the whole thing upside down after a while. Only rarely do my final pieces resemble the original inspiration. But it makes me very glad when I see that a participant manages to do just that – take their inspiration further along, turning it into something ‚hers’.

Early stages of development of a participant's design

This workshop demands that students be ready to try something new and different, and definitely that they be willing to start over and over, and perhaps over a third time if they should discover that things  weren’t working out the way they had first thought. It’s not a class from which you return home with a finished top.

During this last workshop several participants did not sew any more than the first few techincal assignments. Instead, they spent the rest of the two days intensively working on the development of their design. They went home very much satisfied, because they realized that they had invested their time well by continuously altering, editing and improving their designs. The sewing could be done at home.

In each of the instances when I taught the workshop there was at least one participant who was working with a (rather young) child’s drawing as the inspirational picture. I still have the impression that it would be easier for many participants if they would indeed do that, because I usually found the designs based on the children’s drawings the most interesting designs in these workshops. This may well be because children’s drawings, for adults’ eyes, have a certain degree of abstraction already, making it easier for beginners in own design to start their individual process of abstraction from there.

In this most recent workshop, however, a wonderful design was developed from a picture of the German Bundestag:

I will not show the resulting design here, though, because I don’t want to pre-publish anything that is not mine. But I am definitely looking forward to seeing the finished quilt! Let me just tell you this: you wouldn’t recognize that it was derived from a picture of the Bundestag!

November, full of plans

Out of the twelve different months of the year, November is the one I like the least. This is partly due to the fact that the days are getting shorter and shorter – and one knows after the end of the month there are still three more weeks of even shorter days before the winter solstice! Another factor is the weather in Germany in November – a lot of fog and drizzle etc.

However, this year seems to be slightly different. For one thing, the weather has been pretty good so far. Today was mostly sunny, and last remnants of foliage have a wonderful autumnal range of colors on display:

For another, the whole month is full with exciting things that keep me so busy I have hardly time to catch my breath.

It started with a scheduled weekend class at the Petersberg, a Catholic Community College where I have been teaching patchwork classes for several years. This one is going to be ‚Finish your UFOs!’, and I am really looking forward to it. I am curious to find out what kind of UFOs the participants are going to bring along, and what we are going to decide to do about them.

Sometime during the spring the administrator of Petersberg came up with the idea that they would like to host an exhibition of my works for two months, and we decided to match the beginning date with the class: November 20, the opening is at 7.30 p.m. If you should be around, feel free to drop in! So that meant I had to work on invitation cards, which really should have been sent by now, and of course I wanted to finish new quilts to show.

Then I had the idea that it would be nice to have something else in the realm of greeting cards and the like than just the greeting cards from my series ‚Metamorphoses’. So I set myself to designing a new calendar of my quilts from the series ‚Play of Lines’. That, of course, took several hours and days longer than originally intended. But I learned a lot more about the design program I use, and I am really proud of myself that I had the idea to make a perpetual calendar. It should have been printed by now and should arrive later this week.

Then my good friend Lisa Eiter asked me to teach my new class, „IQ – from inspiration to quilt“, at the Fraueninsel in Lake Chiemsee at the end of the month.

And, of course, there was this idea with the fabric club for hand-dyed fabrics, which also somehow demanded that the first shipment be sent during November... After several days of dyeing, cutting, wrapping them in tissue, registering the business, and investigating about adequate packing materials, the first sixteen packages are just waiting to be off the shelf. Aren't you curious to see what colours are in them? In just a few days the secret will be revealed. 

So the entire month is full of work and various things that need to be taken care of. I have been making lists and crossing things off, and it has kept me very busy, I did not even have time to notice the weather on those days when it wasn’t good enough for my taste.

And once I will have finished all of these, December will roll around, and there will be Christmas cookies to bake and …