(So what would be a good title for this post?)

Can't think of anything that catches it all...

Today I finished the binding for the large traditional quilt that uses snow-dyed fabrics for the article in Patchwork Professional magazine.

Fun to quilt on the longarm!

Ready to be shipped so they can take care of proper photography in the studio.

The 'modern' quilt had been finished earlier in the week.

Because this is for a magazine publication, I will not post any full-view pictures of either of these before the publication of the magazine. But I'm glad I am done and can concentrate on other things now. I would have wanted to start dyeing the November selection of the fabric club tonight, but I wasn't home when the new shipment of threads would have arrived by courier, now I have to go and pick it up tomorrow and can't do anything yet. A relatively quiet evening, then.

Of course, there is always something else going on. I am working on catching up on my Journal Quilts for QGBI Contemporary Group:

But I only just now realized that the one of the left hand sidedoesn't have
a real piece of orange in it.... Have to see what I can do about that!

I had busy days with some unpleasant things going on for the Senegalese students in my German class, and I got to visit with the newborn baby of one of them.

She is the sweetest little girl, and I found it impossible to believe that my 11-yr-old was exactly the same size when he was born. How they grow up!
I played in a performance of Gabriel Fauré's Requiem on Sunday, and thought how much I would like it for my husband to find a different position so there would be more opportunities again for me to play in an orchestra.
I am totally upset at what is still going on in Aleppo, and that Russia and several African states are pulling out of the International Court in Den Haag. And now that Angela Merkel has announced her candidacy for next year's elections these stupid alpha blokes in Bavaria are again talking rough to harm her. Do they really think that they are going to improve their own results like that? All they're doing is harming the entire democratic system because we are going to have just as unpleasant an outcome of the election as all the other countries that are having problems right now... I wish I could just live on a small island where world politics don't matter. Even if water levels are rising.

After the Festival of Quilts

I spent a few days in Birmingham at the Festival of Quilts. I was so busy every single day that I was there that I found no time to post anything. It was absolutely lovely to see so many friends in such a short time, and to be in a 1000%-quilting-environment! By the time I left yesterday afternoon I had actually managed to see every exhibition on the floor, done a bit of shopping, done a few interviews for the German Guild's magazine, and a lot of talking. Of the latter I would not have minded having done more, but I was also very tired by that time, so perhaps it was not that bad a time to leave. Although I probably won't be back next year as I have a few other plans for that summer...
In any case it was very well worth the trip and I am very grateful to my parents who paid for the flight, which had been my birthday present in May!
Perhaps I will post a few pictures of interesting quilts in the next few days, but I don't know yet. Definitely my absolute favorite on the entire was this one from the Young Quilters Groups/School challenge "on the seaside":

Fishergate Primary School York, "Seagulls on the beach looking for picnics!"

We had a very nice SAQA meeting, I spent the evenings with my co-rep Chrisse Seager who had booked me into her hotel and was so gracious to keep driving me back and forth. We've been working together as co-reps so well for the past year that it has really been a wonderful time despite the fact that she stepped in after Maggie Birchenough had to resign due to her fatal illness. It will be sad to leave when it comes to the point...

At the airport I got to be a bit crabby, perhaps because I was tired after these packed days - but somehow all these methods they are now applying for check-in and security somehow are spoiling the fun. Not only was I robbed of my best set of knitting needles on the flight to Birmingham - which I had been allowed to take on board the so-called safest airline of the world only a few weeks ago when I went to Israel. But Lufthansa has now changed every thing to self-check-in, in Munich you don't even get to see a person when checking your luggage. In Birmingham they make you walk miles to the machines where you do the self-check-in, then you have to walk all the way back to drop the bag, and there there are still people at the counter - why could they not do the check-in? Not that I can't do a self-check-in properly, I can very well handle that. But I don't unterstand why we are being forced to deal with machines everywhere and in any possible situation. Wouldn't it make more sense to leave these jobs as jobs for people, to keep them employed and give them an income so they can then be tax-paying members of society? Certainly something I don't understand!

On the plane I was then sitting next to a guy from somewhere Middle East who was constantly biting, no, chewing his nails and watching/playing with his cell phone, and it looked like he was listening to some muezzin. In days like these it does give you a bit of a worry - why is this guy so nervous that he has to be chewing his nails constantly (he wasn't eating his meal either...) I plugged in my music and started some hand stitching on my next Journal Quilt to keep myself occupied and not worry too much.

And today, although that one isn't finished yet, I started piecing the next one, because I only have this coming week to finish both of them if I don't want to be kicked out ... But I am optimistic I will make it.

So it's good to be back home.

Writing, stitching, coaching

At the beginning of last week, after my return home from France, I spend quite a bit of time translating an interview, which I had been conducting via e-mail, for the magazine of the German Patchwork Guild. The interview had only been arranged for two days before the deadline, and it took a couple of days for the interviewee to respond, then a while to translate... As I had been told that the magazine editor was not too happy if contributions came in late, that added a bit to my anxiety. But I have contributed an impressive six or seven pages to the magazine, in  two weeks of officially being a member of the writing staff - my contract requires me to contribute approx. eight per issue, i.e. every three months. I guess that is definitely a well-fulfilled contract for 'my' issue. Now I am curious how it all will look in print!
Parallel to translating I finished my Journal Quilt for April and spent time working on one of my way overdue pieces for International Threads. It is supposed to feature 'autumn colours', and at first I pieced scraps from that colour group.

This background I overlaid with an enlarged and slightly cropped drawing by Ellsworth Kelly.

Right now I am in the process of stitching, after machine quilting around the outer edges of the petals has been finished.
And I have been giving a considerable amount of thought to how I will go about marketing the knit-along I have been working on.

Prototype no. 1, lace yarn, wide ...

prototype no. 2, sock yarn, narrower, ...

and prototype no. 3, currently still under construction (but almost done!),
with the final order of patterns.

Together with my test-knitter Maike  we set the starting date for mid-June. This gives me a few more weeks to get the word out, and the days at Nadelwelt Karlsruhe, where I will be selling fabrics, to lure even more people into joining the fun. Yesterday I spent a couple of hours leaving lots of announcements on various German 'knitting' related pages on facebook, sending announcement mails to more than 200 addresses in my e-mail-account (I had no idea I even had that many listed, and that's only German addresses!) A few people have already signed up, which makes me happy. It will be interesting to see, how many people will actually join.

Getting out of and still dealing with the refugee crisis

Yesterday I was featured on the TAFA blog with an entry I had written on my experiences with the refugees and how that has affected my art. Yesterday was also the day when I handed over the volunteer network’s e-mail account to my successor in that function, thus ending my involvement with the network in an ‘official’ position. That does not mean I am withdrawing completely, as today I started German lessons with another refugee from Afghanistan, who had not come to me for lessons before. Only now I am not acting as a representative or spokesperson towards the city anymore. I am being completely selfish in that I take my pick - I chose the refugees with whom I want to work. Happy to be involved with them, and helping where possible, but only for people whom I like, and where I have the feeling that they’re not taking advantage of me and my time. Who are appreciating what I am doing for them, and where I have the impression that I am making an impact. I really felt good during the German lesson today, very relieved.

Before that I had already spent an undisturbed few hours this morning stitching, concentrating on my quilts. The blog post for TAFA closes with a statement that at present I am not consciously planning any more quilts that deal with the topic of refugees, but in fact I am presently still working on finishing two that are somehow related to that topic.

One is one of my very late contributions to the International Threads challenge which was born last year when Kathy Loomis and I were in Prague, bought a set of eight embroidered Afghanistan squares from the Guldusi initiative, and challenged the group to make quilts that included these squares. All of the squares were stitched by the same woman, Nasrin. Most of the resulting quilts are finished already, and you can see them on the group’sblog. Mine – the only one still missing – finally is in the process of being finished, but there may still be a few more stitches that need to be added. I am really feeling what Gillian Travis immediately complained about when we were debating a change in size, that was to begin with this challenge. This is so much bigger than the size we were working in originally! The changed size has since then been totally revoked, back to the original size, but I had dedicated myself to working in the larger new size for this one so that Kathy Loomis’ quilt would not be the only one. For various reasons that I won’t go into detail about here I ended up using three of the embroidered squares, not only the one I picked out at first. 

And I wanted to use them in combination with a piece of fabric for an Afghanistan head dress I had hand-dyed.  I also put the top on the longarm to add some glitter through the quilting thread that I can't use on my sewing machine, and now I am adding a lot of hand stitching to tune down the presence of the stitches on the head dress fabric. 

I am not quite certain how many more stitches will still need to be added, but I did make good progress this morning.

The second quilt still related to that topic is my first finished Journal Quilt for the year, and it resulted from a remnant of the head dress fabric, with a piece of purple and a few other additions. (Only the binding needs to be finalized on the back.) And it’s not really a refugee quilt, it’s just back to playing around with fabrics, threads, composition.

Journal Quilt: The Purple Piece 1

This was a happy stitching day! 

Taking up the challenge(s)

Well, I think I am back amongst the living. Actually, I have been out of bed since early Wednesday morning, simply because it felt like I couldn't lie down any longer, not because I felt like I was on the upswing yet.
But the snows were melting, and already I had missed two days after returning from the workshop, without having set up a bit more of snow dyeing. And who knows whether there is going to be more snow this year? So as unfit as I was I dragged myself out to the nearby parking lot with a wheelbarrow and lugged some snow in to add a few more pieces to the stash. I had to make sure to do this after my son had already left for school, in order not to let him see this act of stupidity that his mother would have told him off for had he done it. And my husband wasn't really pleased with this kind of activity either...
Actually, after I finish this, I will go down to the basement and check on these pieces, as I haven't been down there again yet.

I thought this early part of the year would be quiet. How come I always manage to convince myself that there will be phases like that? The workshop with Lisa Call is keeping me busy, I am finishing pieces for the International Threads exhibition in Prague - and I have decided to get serious about those Journal Quilts of the contemporary group of QGBI. For the entire time that I have been a member I have been considering joining in, but never actually done it. This year they announced the new format of 6 x 12 inches, and you have to decide whether you want to do it in portrait or landscape orientation. At first I signed up for portrait, but virtually in the last minute (closing date is tomorrow) changed my mind and altered my registration  to landscape. I don't do a whole lot of quilts in landscape orientation, so I thought this might be more of a learning experience. Now all I have to do is figure out how to upload the images. Once I get started on actually producing something.
I am also part of a group "ArtFrauen" which has regular challenges as well, and I hope that I can double up on some of all these. Not because I am lazy, but  there are only 24 hours in the day, and when you can't even go at half speed, like I was forced to this week, you just need to figure out how to make things work twice if possible.
For example, I finished the little quilt I was hinting at here, and it served twice for the challenge "Blue" in the ArtFrauen group, and the Extra-Challenge for International Threads in Prague.

Shapes 26

I used reflector fabric in this one,
here is a picture taken with a flash.

It also served once in homework for Lisa Call's class as example of abstraction, so I guess it has really done duty by now! And it will be the newest piece on display in my upcoming exhibition, opening in eleven days. (For which I have to send out invitations - oh, I am sooo behind with things!)

I am also working on a slighter larger interpretation of this for the Australian challenge "True Blue". I've been meaning to enter in that show since I first heard about it at Ste. Marie-aux-Mines last September. But only a couple of weeks ago did I start - deadline is end of the month - who knows whether I will make it...? Challenges indeed. I did not manage to make one for SAQA's "Balancing Act", though. Although I had told myself I would enter at least two or three SAQA shows this year. Well, I hope there will be at least two others that are appealing.