California Fiber Adventures

The sightseeing I did in California, of course, also included the Golden Gate Bridge. Actually I went there twice, the first time because the person I was going to visit didn't open the door when I arrived a mere 90 minutes ahead of time (it turned out their doorbell was broken, she simply hadn't heard me). As their house is right on the edge of the Presidio (talk about a very attractive place to live!) I consulted my phone and maps app and decided there was time to walk to the Golden Gate Lookout and be back for an on-time-appearance. That way I got to experience a sunset at Golden Gate Bridge. 

The next morning I parked my car on the eastern side of the bridge and went up to it, saw the visitor center and the interesting display on how the bridge was built, and then took a long walk along the bay.

Did you know that there had been thoughts for painting the bridge black and yellow?

My travels also included quite a bit of fiber activity.

Apart from meeting Dolores Miller and Judith Content as I have already mentioned, I also went to see Ula Ludie's exhibition which she had posted about on Instagram, @ulaludie, just a little bit before I departed for my trip in a bookstore on 16th St. (For once I managed to easily find a parking space, right in front of the shop, but then almost left my phone there...)

The next day I visited Joe Cunningham in his gallery on Market St., a meeting we had talked about when I saw his exhibition at Festival of Quilts in Birmingham.

 

At Festival of Quilts, Birmingham, Joe Cunningham and I in front of
his triptych "Marisupol" in remembrance of the lives lost during
the Russian attacks on the city during the ongoing war on Ukraine.

 

And then, for the remaining four days of my stay, I got to spend time with the Pixeladies.  First stop with Kris after a stroll across campus and through the Berkeley University Library 

Thirty years ago, when I was an exchange student in High School and
all my classmates went off to college I was already disappointed
that I was not a resident of California, because I really would have liked
to attend UC at Berkeley...

and Indian Food for lunch was ... a yarnstore.

Very tempting, of course, and I did give in to temptation, a little bit.

These days with the Pixeladies, of course, were not only fiber talk, but a lot of fun activities plus fiber talk on the side. We went for a wine tasting in Napa Valley as a group

Dolores Miller, me, Deb Cashatt, Kris Sazaki, Jan Soules (from left)

 with a conclusion of the trip at the di Rosa Gallery with the Northern California Funk Art collection.

Deb taking a picture of this installation, which, unfortunately,
I did not get the details for...

Richard Shaw, Sinking Ship in Couch, 1971

I was very much intrigued by the feeling you get when entering this house made from glass bottles. Yes, not a construction method for houses all over the world (certainly not in German latitudes as insulation would be slightly difficult during winter), but...

Mildred Howard, Memory Garden, Phase I, 1990

I mean - wouldn't it be interesting to live in a surrounding like this?

I spent a full day with Deb Cashatt, first touring her studio and then interviewing her for the Guild's magazine, probably the issue after next one, and we enjoyed exchanging aspects of our fiber involvement and thoughts on making quilts. Now that the Pixeladies have 'retired' their joint venture, she is embarking on a promising solo trip in the quilt world, with a quilt in Quilt National and several others in other prestigious events as well.

A special facet of fiber adventure was my attempt at sending a printed copy of the Guild's magazine to Sarah Swett. I had thought it would be cheaper to mail her personal copy with the article on her from within the United States than from Europe, and so I ventured out to the post office. On a Saturday morning - bad idea, and we should have just got the postage on the computer. The long line quickly convinced me to try the self-postaging machine in the hallway, and after only three or four attempts Kris (who had be then come to assist me!) we did manage to get it off. Sarah has since confirmed the safe arrival of the little package, so everything went well. And it was still just a little bit cheaper than from Europe, if not by much. 

By now I have been back for 10 days already, with many wonderful memories, and I do feel inspired to get back to my sewing machine, making method(s) and fiber concerns. A lot is changing here in my daily set up as I will be starting a new job in January with a completely different arrangement of living circumstances, but right now I am taking it easy, weathering off a cold which I caught from my son and looking out at the snow.

 

SAQA Benefit Auction 2021

For the 12th year in a row I have donated a piece for the SAQA Benefit Auction, a fund-raising event for SAQA which is extremely important for the organization's financing. This auction starts this coming Friday, and that is "Diamond Day", you can purchase any piece you want for $ 1000, the bidding from top down then begins later. Please refer to the website here for the exact procedure.

As always, I wanted to select a 'Dream Collection', but, again as always, I am a bit late with this, so I am not putting it through the SAQA-website, but publishing it here. This year the rules for a dream collection allowed for 8 pieces. As I was looking through dream collections already assembled I realized: Blue had been done (although with different titles, but at least two!), cats had been done, faces had been done, places had been done... it was getting a bit difficult to decide on a theme! In the end I decided to do one that could theoretically include my piece: text on the quilt, with a meaning contributing to the quilt as such.

So here is my Dream Collection 2021:

 

Jette Clover, Celebration

Debo Hysak, She said

 

Denise Konicek, Flight of Idea(l)s

 

Karena Nelson, Communication Skills

The Pixeladies, What's the Point of White Pencils Only?

Susan Rienzo, Untold Story

Susan Shie, Stacey Abrams Rock Haiku

Anne Solomon, The Second Amendment didn't mean this

There are only few more pieces that could have gone into this selection, out of the more than 400 pieces only a dozen or so are using text as a message, although there are a couple of pieces that use fabric with printed text on them. Originally I thought I would be bold and include my own piece in my dream collection - after all, I must be convinced about it to donate it for a cause like this - however, I found 8 pieces that can make up an entire collection as such, so mine is not an official competitor. But I can show it here once more, after all, it would be nice if it got sold for the benefit of SAQA.

Uta Lenk, text messages 28

And, of course, any of the others above, too.

yet again, two more weeks of lockdown/restrictions

 Yesterday the Bavarian government announced two more weeks of regulations regarding opening of shops depending on numbers of infection within a district. Because some types of shops have taken their cases to court - why are hardware stores allowed to open, but not shoe stores? - it is getting stricter again for every type of store. The same with schools. Authorities keep saying schools are an important field for social interaction and that's why it is so important to keep students going there in shifts (half the class only, the other is at home doing assignments), with masks, overstressing teachers who have been working at their limit for so long, while many participants say digital teaching is more effective - and safer in terms of infectious process. It is getting very very tiresome. 

We are having another bout of winter with gusty winds and temperatures that make me shudder (ok, mostly due to the wind chill factor, but that is unpleasant indeed). I am not used to turning on the heater much anymore in April, but I have done so for the past days constantly. It snowed all day yesterday, although it didn't settle on the ground. I am worried about my little pohutukawa tree, a reminiscence of my New Zealand travels (although I bought it here), which returned from its winter storage almost four weeks ago.

So far it is still looking ok, but I do hope it warms up quickly.

 

On the other hand, my field of sunflowers is putting up an amazing speed of sprouting, I took these little fellows inside the house. 

I had a lovely conversation with the pixeladies on zoom yesterday. I have known them personally since they had come to Ste. Marie-aux-Mines for one of the EPM meetings way back then when we were still traveling and I want to include a section on their online teaching in an article I am writing for the German Patchwork Guild's magazine. Talking to them was so much fun and gave me a bit of a boost, emotionally. It made me wonder why I haven't done that more often, now that everybody is doing zoom-casts all the time. I have joined in with some of the regional SAQA meetings for SAQA Europe/Middle East, but they tend to be on Monday nights when I have my piano lesson, and so I can't join in often. This whole covid thing is just wearing me down - and I find it hard to concentrate on creativity and mindfulness for myself. Although I try.

During this chat with Kris and Deb I realized that the #gildemodernburgoyne design-a-thon I have started for the Guild is perhaps not the type of creativity I usually strive for. But it also is a type of creativity, albeit it lacks the haptic aspect that is so important when handling fabric. Of course, ideally, it would lead to a design and a plan that will be executed, getting me back to the fabric. (However, at that stage, the creativity part for me would be mostly finished as I am not really somebody who works from plans.) But I have made a quilt with that pattern - in my own un-planned manner, and wasn't exactly considering making another one ... we will see.

Yet I have been continuing on the design path, and yesterday, in between two night shifts at the hospital, I published my day 10 on the Guild's website forum. As I had said, I wanted to try out the block put onto a corner, and at first I stuck with the rainbow coloring. Here I will present a selection of the various design options I came up with. In this first one, the sashing between the blocks is still relatively broad. The effect of the circle in the interior block gets lost, and the lines of squares appear to be much more prominent than in the other orientation. I did not spend time adapting colors of the squares in the nine-patches between the blocks and the sashing sections, but that would certainly increase the overall unity of the rainbow coloring, pulling the blocks together.

Here, width of sashing was reduced, which results in a more prominent effect of the lines. Blocks between sashing and blocks are four patches.

I also tried a version with colored sashing, taking up the rainbow hues, in both a wide and a narrow sashing.

There were several other versions I tried, and the most surprising one happened when I tried to 'go darker' in the inner block. Probably I had chosen two different hues in the rectangles because when I tried to change their color with 'swap color', this is what happened.

Saved is as a "whoops!" and am kind of in love with it.

Book Appreciation, part 2

During the past month I was given two wonderful books by friends, and want to post about my process of appreciation here.

The first one I was given was the newly published book by Kathleen Loomis, who had been writing about the process of making the book frequently on her blog, and which I have recently written about here.. The second one is by The Pixeladies, whom I have taken the photo editing online class from earlier this year, and whom I finally met in person when they came to teach in France this past month.

Their book is called “Furoshiki Fabric Wraps” and the Pixeladies sent it by mail, after I had returned home, it arrived last week. The book itself was wrapped in a piece of silk. Due to complete ignorance on my side and lack of understanding as to what grand addition to my life it was I was getting there, I thought ‘that’s a good idea’, unwrapped the thing and never took a photo of what it looked like before I opened the present.

This is the book, and what it was wrapped in:

And this is a close-up of what the book looks like, unwrapped (alas):

When I finally started leafing through the book in more detail last Sunday morning as I was having breakfast, I was immediately captivated. And sooooooooooooo regretful that I had not taken a photo of the stage it arrived in... but I managed to remember enough about the process of unpacking that I think the type of wrapping must have been the "Two Knot Wrap" as featured on the front of the book cover (and explained in more detail on page 45). Nobody was home, so even during breakfast I started thinking about what I could wrap to try out some of these wonderful ways of creating packages. (I've always been a fan of Jeanne-Claude and Christo, but this is closer to my own sphere of competence!)

Reusing the silk scarf the book itself had come in was the easiest way of getting hold of a Furoshiki, and as it was a bit too small to do a ‘Two Bottle Wrap’ with two fully-sized water bottles I thought two empty marmelade jars which were sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to be finally taken down to the cellar would do just as well.

waiting to be wrapped...

roll ...

and wriggle, and tie a knot - finished!

Reading the instructions gives you  the feeling that at least one of the Pixeladies is sitting next to you in their distinct manner of explaining – a Furoshiki is easy to do! Once you’ve done one, you want to try more. At least that happened with me. 
Here’s my last piece of shibori dyeing (as in both meanings of the word – my most recent, and the last one I will do, as I have resolved that, as much as I adore the results of good shibori dyeing, making it is just not for me – but that really is another story), 

Practice makes perfect, but that's not for me+shibori.

which seemed a qualified candidate, large enough for two books, to try out the “Two Book Wrap”. As both Pixeladies and I are members of SAQA (Kris being the curren president, too) I figured two issuses of SAQA’s annual portfolio of Juried Artist Members could take some wrapping.

And this is what they look like wrapped:

What a fun and interesting book. Reduces waste, may transform the wrapping into the gift, and they are so easy to do! This is a joint picture of my first two Furoshikis (hope that’s a correct enough way of forming a plural as my knowledge of Japanes is rather limited...):

Certainly a wonderful present to receive, and wrapped in a Furoshiki, that is in itself, in a way! Thank you very much to the Pixeladies – and won’t you need a great gift for a fabric-loving friend any time soon?