Featured.

 Imagine my pleasant surprise this morning when I opened the local newspaper and saw this:

 

I had somehow known that City Hall was going to prepare an updated version of the leaflet that was a ‘Guide to artworks in V.’ (which I, actually, have never seen), but I didn’t know when it would happen. My pleasure increased when I saw that a paragraph specifically mentioned my quilt that I made during the art symposium in what seems almost dozens of years ago. It is referred to as a piece of art that is demonstrating a special connection to the city by using citizens' handwritings in their languages of origin.

 

The quilt has been up on the wall of the entrance area of the town music school for over a year now, but because of Covid there never was any kind of ceremony on the occasion of it being installed, and, even more disappointing, the building is still closed to the general public: music students have to wait outside the entrance, get picked up by their teacher, and nobody else is permitted access to the building. So it was nice to see this first introduction of the quilt to the public this morning. With a photo! 

I could not get hold of a copy of this new leaflet, however, as they are not displayed publically in the town hall, the person responsible for culture wasn’t in her office and the substitute announced on the door had no clue. I will try again some other day. But there is a pdf-download option here.

Naming the Baby

After a few weeks break on and distance to the project that I was working on during the textile artist symposium due to vacation, teaching and another absence with mytrip to the island I have come back. It was taking its time, and although I wasn’t sure why I listened to my inner voice that kept telling me to wait before continuing. During that process I decided not to stitch the contours on the remaining three articles that are rather fine in the handwriting.

Backside view of the Thai script, one of the articles I decided to not give a contour.

I also decided against putting the finished piece onto a wooden frame, which had been my original thought. Mostly because I have never put a quilt of that size onto a wooden frame, my experience is constricted to smaller sized pieces, and I did not want to risk anything with this piece.

So today, after finishing the side facings and attaching the fabric that will be the lower tunnel, I sat down with my husband for a bit of brainstorming while he was watching the first quarter final of the World Championships. The working title ‘text messages 18’ is just not expressive enough.

And I arrived at the decision to call it “#UDHR (text messages 18)”. 

Now I can finish the remaining steps, and am planning to take it to be photographed on Monday, and deliver it to the city authorities.

#foqwarmupchallenge

At the beginning of the week I spied on Instagram the hastag for the FoQ-Warmup-Challenge. Immediately I wanted to participate, but it took me a few days to get going. Only on the fifth day did I join in, and posted all of the prompts at once. That is probably not the proper way to do it, but #betterlatethannever, I thought.
In any case I wanted to present my selection here as well.

#myfirstquilt

Log Cabin, one of my alltime favorite patterns, although it has
been a while since I made one... This one is still in use and I
still like it, but it is worn a bit, some fading has occurred
and it may not be a masterpiece. However, I like it just as
you can only like your first quilt.

#wip

There are always many works in progress, so this one was hard to choose. I decided on the A Scrap a Day Project, ongoing, with progress in leaps and bounds...

#myfabricstash

A part thereof ... no further comment necessary, I think.

#quiltcrush

This one wasn't hard at all in terms of deciding. But hard in that I don't have a picture of this quilt except for a photo from the flyer of the museum where I saw this quilt in 2006. I don't think any other quilt has moved me as deeply as this one (although one by Roberty LePoidevin came pretty close!). This is a quilt that was made by former slaves just after the American Civil War, and I was lucky to see it in an exhibition in the Raleigh Museum.

#myproudestproject

Is another work in progress, that I have posted about before and that is nearing completion, although there is still some work that needs to be done: my UDHR-quilt that I was working on during the textile art symposium in May.

Although I did not play by the rules and only posted my pictures on the last day, I do like challenges like this. It's fun to pick out pieces like and present them for others to see.

Textile Art Symposium, 2nd day (updated with pictures)

On Sunday evening I met Judith at the station and took her to the hotel we are staying at in town, and Angelika, the third artist participating in the symposium arrived a little later, so we spent the evening getting acquainted. I realized that I was pretty lucky because I knew the entire setup from earlier symposiums that I had witnessed. The two of them were a bit nervous, which I did not feel like at all. So much so not nervous, that I really only started packing in the evening after I had returned from the dinner we had together. All three of us admitted to the others that we were a bit scared we might not finish during the week and that we had worked ahead to a certain degree. What a relief to hear that I was not alone in that!

On Monday morning we started setting up the tent and work began before noon.

Enough table room, my machine, additional light. Judith Siedensberger's
design sketches on the board in the back right.

Judith at work.

 I did go home for lunch because my husband was out of town and I wanted my son to have company when he came home from school. During the meal he asked me why I had to go and move into the hotel for the week? Would I not rather have slept at home? I said I wanted to be where the others were staying, to join their conversations over the meals, and be out of the family obligations. But, did I have to pay for the hotel? When I denied that he said he said well, then it’s not quite so bad… I was touched that he had mentioned it. Shows that mother out of the house is felt as not ordinary in some way or other. I do agree it is a pretty funny situation to be staying in a hotel which is about the same distance away from the tent where we set up our studio as our house proper, only that the tent is sort of in the middle between the two. And being so close to home gives you the feeling that you can always go and get something in case you’d forgotten to pack it… But I really did want to do it that way because otherwise I would be falling back into doing housework or whatever. Just wish the food were a bit better…

So work has been going well. Yesterday was pretty warm in the tent and although we haven’t put it to use yet I was glad I had packed a small ventilator, just in case. Today it was cooler, even a thunderstorm came through in the late afternoon, which is when I packed up everything for the day to cut off electricity, a good twenty minutes earlier than I had wanted to. 

I’d had some thread- and tension issues in the afternoon, the thread kept breaking while I was stitching Article 20 in Hungarian. As it had not mucked up at all, same thread, this morning when I was doing Article 15 in Portuguese I am dead certain it must be the Hungarian that is causing the problems… and had wanted to finish outlining Article 2 in Wolof before the night. That only got started, however, and it is where I will continue tomorrow. After that there is only one more article to stitch onto the fabric, then I can go (home) and dissolve the stabilizers, wash, dry and iron the top and baste it onto the batting and back fabric. I am planning to start serious quilting tomorrow afternoon. I am managing pretty well with the machine, but I do miss my big working table at home where the machine is level with the table top and the work piece doesn’t get caught on the tray table all the time… I am spoilt with that!

We don’t talk a whole lot but it has been fun working alongside the other two. We have had a few visitors already and most likely the number are going to increase over the next few days.

Unwritten posts...

In my head I have composed at least 5 or 6 different blog posts over the past two weeks. One would have been title ‘intimated through admiration’ and would have talked about how I was struggling trying to quilt a top for Kathleen Loomis. I have always admired her work, and we have become close friends over the years after we met for the first time in a master class at Nancy Crow’s barn. She has entrusted me with two of her gorgeous tops and had given me the freedom to ‘do whatever you want’. When I suggested an idea for the first one, however, she didn’t like that one particularly, suggested something else and I started getting nervous because what she wanted isn’t easy to do on the longarm. I tried, but was thinking I was ruining her top, which resulted in stalled activity on my part. But we resolved the issue, and put off the second top for after the upcoming events that are keeping me very busy into June.

Another post would have been on important life decisions and how they are being taken.  Yet another one on the joy of the reopening of our open air pool which I consider to be the biggest asset of the small town we are living in, but which, as is sensible in German latitudes, closes from September through April, and we must be happy if it reopens on May 1^st already, and we don’t have to wait until the middle of the month. 

Then I went to the Nadelwelt in Karlsruhe and wanted to write about that, but by now I should know that it is virtually impossible to do that while the show is on if I still want to catch a sufficient amount of sleep… 

Plus, there are so many people who report about events like that that I have kind of decided that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to keep adding to that. But I did teach a class, and I could have reported on how that went, as it was a new class…

In any case, I have been very busy. Also with the preparations for the Textile Art Symposium that will begin on the coming Monday. I collected all the handwritten samples of articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that I will use, and it was fascinating to see people’s reactions. With some articles I had been the person to suggest for some of the participants that they write this particular article. But at the beginning, when only a couple of articles had been chosen, I was thrilled about how people chose ‘their’ article because it meant a lot to them personally. And even in the later stages, when I was suggesting, it turned out that my suggestions coincided with people’s special interests. I had asked a woman from Brazil to write an article in Portuguese, and as she was the last one in the long line, it was article 15 that had not been done before. The article on the right to have and to change a nationality. It turns out she had wanted to do so, give up her Brazilian nationality to become only German to reduce difficulties and bureaucracy. But Brazil does not allow that. Once a Brazilian, you cannot give that up, so she had double citizenship. Brazil does not adhere to the UDHR in this aspect. The woman writing in Hungarian chose article 20, on freedom of press and freedom to assemble, because she thought that was something to vex the current leader. And it continued like that.

People I have been talking to about the project find it interesting. Some did not even know there is such a thing as a Universal Declaration of Human Rights…

Article 1 in Xhosa

I have started stitching and am making progress, although I still don’t know whether I will be able to finish during the week we will be working in the public realm behind the City Hall. And after we had the warmest and driest April since the beginning of weather data recordings it is turning cold, and is supposed to rain next week… Might have to retrieve my ski underwear which I have already packed away for the summer!

Then there are all the things I did not do. But I won't lament about that. Somebody suggested I might have a problem saying 'no', which I had never thought about. Given the fact that my mother claims 'no' was the first word I said I had never thought it might be a problem. And I don't think it is. It is a problem, though, that I think too many things are important and should be paid proper attention. What I need to learn, it seems, is, to find out early enough how much of my personal attention that needs to be.