What to say.

In the news they are counting the days since the attack on Iran - "day x since ..." - and that number also indicates the days since I have completely lost hope that the world will find a way out of this misery. Of course, we need to add the number of days since Feb 24, 2022, the attack on Ukraine (or, more honestly: since 2015, the annexing of Krimea), and the days since Oct. 7, 2023 and what Israel has been doing to Gaza - note: I completely condemn the mass murder on Israeli citizens that day. But the degree of retaliation has been out of measure. And I don't know what to say. Don't forget Sudan, Myanmar... it is absolutely horrifying that humans can't seem to be able to live in peace. Sometimes I wish that somebody would just push the button, blow us all up and leave the planet devoid of the human race, certainly it would fare better like that. Then there might be hope.

Stitching and sewing and knitting seems irrelevant in the current situation. And yet I continue, to avoid despair.

20 Perspectives had their newest reveal last week, and although my piece isn't entirely finished, there is a blog post up and can be seen here.  The title hasn't been decided on finally, yet, but it's probably going to be "Who is Afraid of Ana Mendieta?", since her work was inspirational for this piece, as I describe on the 20 Perspectives blog.

As of yet Untitled...

 The edges haven't been finished yet, but I do hope to get around to that next week.

And I have an idea for the third piece in the series, it's brewing in my mind. 

I am still juggling with my two laptops and having a hard time getting myself acquainted with GIMP for photo editing, but hope to get around that soon as well.

Good and interesting news is that I was invited to have a solo show at Dansk Patchwork Forening's  annual AGM in August. At first that came as a complete surprise, I had  somehow given up on having another solo show again, was concentrating on making quilts for the individual challenges of 20 Perspectives, and for Voyage (we had a show in Glasgow weekend before last, and will have an exhibition at Nadelwelt Karlsruhe in May). 

 

And I have been invited to pick a virtual gallery for SAQA for June, which is going to be fun and interesting. Will that cheer me up? A bit, certainly. But what I really and truly want is for all the wars on this planet to end. It's absolutely not right to continue like this.  

Looking forward to going to teach at Petersberg next week. Three days of retreat in a house where you can sew all day and don't have to bother about the rest of the world is just what I need now!

A few hours at the machine, catching up.

 

One major disadvantage of my current living arrangement (there aren’t many!) is that I don’t have good sewing equipment/arrangement at the place where I work and spend more time. I was assuming I would be doing a lot of sewing at my husband’s accommodation and not have too much time for it anyway where I live for work. This summer, however, I spent a lot less time down south than had been the original. It felt like I hadn’t done any serious sewing in ages.

 Two weeks ago I picked up my son in Amsterdam, first spending a day in that beautiful tourist-ridden city (yes, I was one of them, I know).

Amsterdam at night.

City of bikes... this one looks like it hasn't been used in a while!

Not the typical tourist photo subject!

  I went to see the Banksy museum and the photography museum.

 

And picked up some batting at the quilt shop which is conveniently located a mere 5-minute walk from his nice (and outrageously expensive) apartment on one of the grachten. Students these days do live rather differently than I did when I was in that stage of my studies! Not that I needed a quilt shop back then.

The next day we drove south-east together and then spent almost a week at my husband’s place.

View from my sewing room - and when my son is home, 
I also sleep in this room on a small mattress on the floor.

 

There I finally got to sit down at my sewing machine again. I managed to proceed pretty far with my contribution to the next 20 Perspectives challenge which will be revealed in the group next week and then visible on the 20 Perspectives Blog a few days afterwards. Although mine won’t be entirely finished by reveal date because I decided to start adding hand-stitches (French Knots) in addition to the bit of machine quilting I used.

There used to be a time when I said 'I don't do appliqué'.
That seems to have changed.

 

I also managed to get ahead with the 3D-piece we were supposed to have finished a while ago – was it June? But I also decided that I will try to enter it in a call for entry so won’t publish a ‘finished photo’ until I receive notification of acceptance or rejection.

 

Made a decision about two quilts for Voyage, too, so right now I am only two quilts short for that group commitment, but those two are the ones that need to be finished earlier and I really need to get going about them. I do have an idea, but…

It definitely felt good to be back sewing, after all that time. Almost like going back after withdrawal symptoms. Certainly the urge to be 'making' with one's hands can be a kind of addiction. When I pack my bags for train travel I take enough knitting supplies to last me at least twice or three times the length of the journey. After all, the train could be delayed. Or we could be hijacked and I would be caught in there without having something to keep me occupied. Better be prepared.

I think I (sort of) hate this quilt.

This past August I was invited to join the ‘Voyage’ International Textile Artists Group and immediately said yes. As with joining the 20 Perspectives, my aim was to boost my creativity, have something to work towards, giving me some kind of anchorage in this terrible year 2024, hoping, it would all turn out for the better.

At first, I had said I would most likely not be able to contribute to the group’s upcoming exhibition at BMO ’25, thinking it would prove to be too much stress to whip out a quilt in the short amount of time I would have once we finished our move. Especially as the topic ‘alchemy’ didn’t exactly cause a flood of ideas that asked to be put into a quilt.

When we started unpacking all our boxes in the new apartment, however, the first thing I put on the design wall was a conglomeration of fabrics with a special meaning, because I had come up with an idea after all. Searching the internet for a definition led me, of course, to Wikipedia, and the German page defines the term ‘alchemy’ as „die Lehre von den Eigenschaften der Stoffe und ihren Reaktionen“, i.e. the doctrine of the characteristics of elements/materials and their reactions with each other. (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemie)

The German noun “Stoffe”, however, also means ‘fabrics’, which gave me a short cut for my interpretation. Fabrics have a relationship and some kind of reaction when they are put next to each other, especially when sewn together, and when special fabrics are joined, the alchemy between them takes off. I decided to pair some of my special fabrics that were all waiting to be used: rust dyed fabric pieces I had brought home from my trip to South Africa, an indigo dyed scarf, the kimono from my collage project with Kathleen Loomis. I discovered that the pattern on the indigo dyed scarf, which I liked in its design but didn’t wear much because it felt too narrow, was off-set a bit when folded in half: the patterns don’t exactly match. Which I really like a lot.

 

The rust-dyed pieces came home with me from South Africa, and I love them for their coloring, intensity of pattern, and, of course, because they remind me of the trip to Krueger Park and the quilt festival at Johannesburg.

 

Alchemy, in my understanding for this quilt, is not only restricted to the interaction of chemical elements, but I am extending it to fabrics, when placed next to each other. Putting it all together felt good, and after a bit of turning and changing I liked to layout, too.

First attempt - but it got turned around.

 

However, as I had noticed before in another context, but completely forgotten, the rusted fabrics from South Africa are so tightly woven that they are VERY difficult to sew, which was the reason why I had not used these particular fabrics up yet. Sewing them was hard for the machine, and quilting over them caused multiple thread breakages, disruptions in the quilting process and unpleasant loops on the backside. I was indeed getting to the point where I could have thrown this piece out of the window!

 

Deciding on a quilting design then proved another challenge. Yet when I started reading former chancellor Angela Merkel’s memoir that was published recently, and read the section on her most famous (or infamous) statement throughout the 16 years of her chancellorship, I thought it would be interesting to add another layer of alchemy. The quote is from 2016, when Germany was facing the massive influx of more than one million Syrians fleeing the civil war in their country, and quite a few other refugees from several other countries. Chancellor Merkel said that Germany had faced so many difficult situations and overcome them, and that we would be able to deal with and overcome this challenge as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDQki0MMFh4

Interestingly enough, her full statement was hardly ever quoted, but reduced to the three-word-phrase ‘we will manage’. Events following this massive influx of refugees had and still have quite an alchemic-like effect on German society, which I myself felt vividly while I was trying to accompany refugees through the maze of German administration, rules and regulations, giving them guidance for everyday life in a country that is rather different from their own. For this quilt on alchemy I decided to put as much of the quote onto the quilt surface as would fit, and except for a few last words, most of it is on there.

 

Yes, I hated the quilting because of the difficulties with the densely woven fabric. No, I don’t think it is one of my strongest quilts. But it is giving a platform for some of my favorite fabrics, and it includes a statement for which I still admire our former chancellor. At this particular moment it is still not clear whether we have indeed managed to deal with the crisis, our current political situation is partly due to that refugee crisis (combined with problems going back to German reunification, and probably even further back). And in the end I don’t really hate this quilt. But it made a good title for this post (which I started some time in December and am only now finding time to finish).

 

Addendum: This quilt will be on display together with the other Voyage quilts in the collection "Alchemy" at the Scottish Quilt Show in Glasgow in March and at the Brno Patchwork Meeting in April.

What a week...

it’s been, that last one. The election in the US, the end of the German coalition government, a football match in Amsterdam gone riot. Excuse me? No comment on either of these happenings from my side. We all have to live with it, and …

I spent a few days at my mother’s place, first celebrating her birthday, then tackling tasks of dealing with the aftermath of my father's passing end of July. There are numerous visits to her place ahead of us in the near future. Donating his clothes to a charity was probably one of the easier ones, although not really easy for either of us. I took some of his shirts, thinking I may use them for comfort quilts. And his hankies, which I already turned into an advent calendar for my son. That now needs to be shipped to Amsterdam when I have found a suitable box ( and no, he did not get caught up in the riots, his campus is far enough away from where things were happening).

Advent calendar for a big boy now out there in the big world...
perphaps more of a comfort for the mother to make it than a necessary gift?

 Now my husband and I are getting acquainted with the situation of being together only the two of us again, an empty nest in a new place. A lot of things still need to find their place and although only a relatively small number of boxes remain to be unpacked (but first we need to get hold of a shelf to be able to put the contents somewhere) and some order has indeed been achieved I would not say that I have developed a real sense of belonging. In fact, I am a bit at a loss when people ask me ‘and have you settled down yet?’ 

We go for walks to explore the surroundings.

The area used to have granite quarries, and porcelain factories,
but most of that has disappeared.

 

I did enjoy the last couple of days of the so-called ‘inversion weather situation’ when I could see in the weather app that almost all of Germany was covered by fog, cold air trapped beneath the higher, warmer layer that we were fortunate to enjoy. 

 

That is a benefit of this place I had not taken into consideration. It used to be that I was the one caught below, under the fog, and that always was a difficult situation for me to bear. 

 

One of the still-not-turned-into-order places is my studio. Smaller than before, fewer shelves, and I just haven’t been here enough to work myself through it all and establish a decent system. But I have sewn a bit, even finished a top already. In the summer I was invited to join the international quilt group Voyage, and although I was a bit at a loss for an idea to sew something for the theme ‘Alchemy’, I wanted to make it a point to participate right away. Once the idea had surfaced it all came together quickly and I have already basted it. Let’s see how quilting goes.

A pre-final view of 'Alchemy of Fabrics', using a number of 'special'
fabrics that have either been treated with a special dyeing method
(indigo, or rusting), or have a special geographic origin
(African countries, Japan), or a special emotional connotation (custom
printed fabric with my son's handwriting from a few years ago).

 Another object that needs to be completed is my first piece for 20 Perspective’s current year-long topic which will eventually count three pieces by each of the members. The first one was due in June, and I did not finish on time. The second reveal within the group took place recently, and I haven’t started the second piece yet, although I do have an inkling where the fabrics might be that I want to use. I hope to be back on track for the third reveal date in January.