Abstract & Geometric in Heidelberg (Diary of Recovery no.5)

Last week I spent quite a lot of hours on trains. Due to uncoordinated planning a family issue took me to Würzburg and back on Tuesday, and on Wednesday I had planned a trip to finally see the SAQA exhibition "Abstract & Geometric" at the textile museum in Heidelberg.

I have a piece in there, but could not go to the opening in March. Then, before I could make plans, the virus hit, travel was not permitted, and then the museum closed. Now I was happy to find out that it reopened, and the exhibition is extended, too. So if you get a chance to go to Heidelberg before July 12, make sure you go on a Wednesday or on the weekend, because the museum is not open every day.
Agreed, it was a lot of hours on the train, with mask, to see this exhibition, going back and forth in one day, but it was definitely worth the trip.

In the middle of the room: one SAQA box

The museum is an old parsonage and has a special feel to the exhibitions room.

And it felt good to see my quilt "Play of Lines VIII" hanging next to big names in the quilting world, including many favorites of mine.

I don't want to single out one particular artist in the show - you have to go see it. But I do want to give an idea of the impact of Else van Barle's piece "Letters from a friend" that can be seen from the back in the picture above, and in a detail shot right here:

But all the other pieces in the show are just as impressive. The catalogue is available via the SAQA store, or you can pick up a copy in Heidelberg! Or at one of the following venues.

That day, all the trains were on time, and I arrived home early enough to catch a good night's sleep. And today our open air pool opened up! Lots of restrictions, and only a certain number of people allowed in the pool, swimming in lanes, not passing each other, and Germans' understanding of freedom is that they can swim in the pool in whatever manner they like, why should they stay in lanes, or heaven forbid, abide by a regulation as to how fast you should be able to swim in this particular lane... But getting to go to swim is better than not at all. So I feel much better now after I have come back from the first visit. And perhaps there will be some rainy days when the others don't want to go to the pool, then it will be my time.

I lost count.

As lockdown here has been relieved slightly, some school classes are beginning to go back and my son is asking my why he can’t stay in home schooling for the rest of his school years. This, although he still has several weeks before his class will be called back, in two-weekly intervals only, and so he will see the school building from the inside probably not much more than three weeks or so before summer vacation. Of course, the way our conversations go on a regular basis I know very well that home schooling him would never work in our combination of temperaments, and it is not allowed in Germany anyway. He has lost count of how many weeks he has not been in school. (I do worry about how his education is going to continue, though. Not clear on how it all will go on…)

I myself have lost count of the numbers of UFOs I have spread out through the house, the studio, my knitting baskets. Some of them old and rediscovered. But at least half a dozen of them pandemically new. Well, who knows how long this thing will laslt, perhaps they will not stay unfinished forever, perhaps not even for long? I know that sounds and is ambitious – but I can announce that I did indeed finish two of mine, and a quilting commission for a friend.

My first finish – and I mean complete finish, with a sleeve, and a title and a sign that states the title, is my contribution to the SAQA benefit auction. It is a woven quilt, made from silk strips I bought in Birmingham, it must have been two years ago or so, including two pieces of ribbons that had been splattered amidst the heap of debris on my working table. One of the ribbons has LOVE written on it repeatedly, and the other REPEAT. Add a fragment of a handmade mask as they have so quickly come to be all over, made from an old dish towel. And then earth and some continents in contour stitched over that – “Love. Protect. Repeat.” As there is text involved, I figured it should be part of my “text messages” series. Unfortunately I seem to have somehow lost count of how many pieces there are in the series by now. At least in my mind. So I guessed it might be number 20. Made the label.

But: As I am clearing up the working table in my studio I keep stumbling over reminiscences of “oh yeah, that one, too…” The disappearance of some of my data due to the loss of my laptop doesn’t help in this case, either – but lo and behold, I did save most of my pictures in October as a precaution (however, not the document data, stupid me). So when I figured out which of the four external hard drives I have accumulated indeed holds these files of pictures I got to look up the appropriate number. As it turns out, there is a number 20 already touring France, or, being lockdowned in France I should say these days. And as I have another text piece in the works, this one is 22. So do I redo the label, which is stitched on the sleeve… or what? Oh dear, the kind of problems we have these days!

Correct Number: 22
"Love. Protect. Repeat. (text messages 22)"

The other piece is the finished black and yellow top , but I will write about that when it comes off the longarm (which it is going on to later today). Certainly have to figure out which number that one is, too, because it has been so long since I added a piece to the series Play of Lines!

Jagging edges, slowly.

We are beginning our ump-teenth week of covid-19 restrictions (with slight modifications) and although politicians are talking about ‘the new normal’ I have to admit that I am still finding it hard to accept this as a kind of normality. I have now been put to work in the ward at hospital that takes ‘light’ cases who do not need breathing machines – but right now numbers are down so far that this is basically a potential scenario only: we had one covid-19 patient yesterday, all the others are serious cases of some respiratory problems that were ‘suspects’ but tested negative. We will see whether the first round of easing up some restrictions – small shops were allowed to open again beginning of the week while wearing a mask when shopping or using public transport is mandatory – will result in rising numbers, or whether the first round was indeed won (‘keeping the reproduction rate below one’). But I don’t want to get into any discussion or reasoning about it all. 

My son is supposedly going to have some kind of school contact sometime soon, but we are assuming that there won’t be any kind of regularity in it before summer vacation. That same son of mine is turning fifteen today. He is not a baby or toddler anymore indeed,

Even here he wasn't a baby anymore - but that day he surprised
me by reverting to his one-time favorite pastime of throwing rocks
into the water which he hadn't done then for a while. Who knows
whether he would still do that today? He said he is 'too old' to
wear a handmade mask with a pirate skull which grandma sent him
and passed it on to my husband (I thought to myself, yes, right now
you are not old enough again to start enjoying stuff like that.)

and although I am absolutely grateful for the fact right now because I would go nuts having to tend to a child all day without being allowed to go outside to playgrounds with him, or let him meet other kids, I am a bit scared about what the future has in mind for him and his generation.

With all this in the background I nevertheless managed to focus to the degree that I am not constantly hopping from one project to the next any more and starting between three and five new WIPs per week. I have managed to concentrate on one big piece of sewing I am working on, one new project which was started by @mary_and_patch’s post on a quilt that basically sews itself, and one or two pieces of knitting at various points in the house. (The knitting I was sweating over for my last post has progressed and is in fact going pretty smoothly for now.)

The big piece is based on a sample I started in Kathleen Loomis’ workshop on her fine line technique that she taught here right after we returned from Prague oh so many years ago. It had been sitting on my shelf, then got deposited in a box, then reappeared during the recent attempts at decluttering.

I have gone through various stages of excitement, frustration, rearranging and despair and was close to shoving it back in the box day before yesterday. At one point I thought I had messed it all up because the edges between color fields were too straight for my liking. Not jagged enough.

How...

...to deal...

... with that cross?

Online suggestions from Kathy and Regine helped me over these bumpers and I think I am slowly getting somewhere. The trick is to relegate the longer seams, which are necessary to put it all together, into the second row so to speak. That way the direct confrontations between two colors will develop interruptions and make it interesting for the eye to look at. 

This is the color arrangement I currently want to work with, and I do hope
it all comes together soon.

By now the piece is getting to be far larger than I intended, but I was so happy that at least a kind of feeling similar to what once was a pretty regular experience of quilting flow happened, even if it was more of a trickle in spurts than a serious flow that I wouldn’t have wanted to curb that. If I want to stay in my time frame I need to keep working in a rather concentrated manner whenever I am home and can find time. That’s a good motivator and incentive. Perhaps that kind of new normality is something I will feel more comfortable about.

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….