Christmas Goodies, New Year, changes

Christmas treated me well in terms of fibre goodies. After publicly admitting that I had broken my vow to finish off most of my sock yarn before ever buying any new ones all defense mechanisms had broken down. I had ordered a few balls on sale from Zen Yarn Garden (and am thankful to Kathleen Loomis for shipping them because the sale vendor would not ship to Germany, and I had to sneakely give them a US-address) and a few sale items from sock obsession yarns (who were kind enough to ship to Germany, but of course one has to be careful about the amount and postage and customs). So my box full of sock yarns is truly overflowing now. These have not even been admitted yet.

I also received a gift of some spinning fibre, which included a sample packet of luxury fibers, and a sample packet of Blue Faced Leicester mixes. And a bit of camel and alpaca, and wool with silk and...

Before Christmas, during advent, I had had an advent calendar with fibres, merino with silk, with one 20-g-pack to open every day, hand-dyed, in a color way of which you did not know in the beginning where it would end.

Although I did start to spin it already on the first day of advent I haven't finished spinning it all. But I am on color no. 7, and I have decided how I am going to ply it.  So now I know where I am going with this.

I slept through New Years fireworks because I had to go to work at 5.40 a.m. on the 1st, with a practical exam on the 2nd. But since I have never been a great one to go to New Years' parties, that was ok. Next week I will be going back to school for four weeks, then another stretch of work on the ward.
Before Christmas some more developments took place with my school-study situation, and these require that I make a few more changes to my schedule and 'everything that I want to be doing'-load. Which led to a hard but quickly found and next day executed decision, namely that I have discontinued writing my German blog. I had started that when I was beginning the fabric club, then began writing an English blog a few days later. I always tried to keep them different from each other, and it has been a good deal of work, and time consuming to come up with enough (of what I think) interesting aspects to keep both of them going, and disparate, and sort of regular... Now that I am not doing the fabric dyeing business anymore, and because of the fact that the number of readers for the English blog is noticeable higher, I have decided to concentrate on writing the English blog. Time has become much more precious since October, and if I want to continue writing anything at all something needed to change. (A design brush up might be necessary sometime soon, too.) I do hope to be able to keep posting regularly, slightly more frequently than lately, and with new and interesting ideas about textile work in the New Year. Happy New Year 2019 to everyone, may it be peaceful, gentle and full of love.

Blog Hop

This post should have been up on the 20th, but something went wrong, I had prepared it and was offline for several days:

I have been invited by my friend Frauke Schramm to participate in a blog hop. That includes answering four questions about my art, and nominating three other people to continue the hop. Frauke published her post about the questions last Saturday, it is my turn today, and my three nominees should have their posts ready by next Saturday.

These are my answers to the questions:

 1.) What am I working on/writing?

These days I am in the finishing processes for the last pieces that will be part of a three-person-show in October, in the UNESCO World Heritage Site Fagus Works, the first building that Walter Gropius planned and built after setting up as an architect, before he later went on to found the Bauhaus School. The other two artists exhibiting are Mary Schliestedt and Gabi-Julia Weimer. The exhibition has the title “Inspiration Bauhaus”, and I have been working towards this deadline for over a year now. As much as I have enjoyed focussing on this topic, and working in a rather geometric set of mind for a while, I am very much looking forward to this opening, as I hope that after that I will be able to work in other directions for a while. So many different ideas have been coming to me recently which mostly I could not follow up because the show was still looming on the horizon...

Then, I plan to return to a few more ideas that will be part of my earlier series “Play of Lines”, and I also have several projects in the backdrop that will be part of a newly developing series, “text messages”.

Shapes 21, 12"x12"

2.) How does my work/writing differ from others of its genre?

I’m not sure whether it is on me to describe how my work differs from others – or whether this would have to be done from an outsider’s perspective. I certainly hope that I have developed my own voice, and that my work has it’s unique style that is recognizably mine. Due to the fact that everybody is constantly being influenced by the world around them, however, exactly that ‘own voice’ is one of the most difficult parts of making art, I think. A constant process of re-evaluation, permanent self-questioning and ongoing exciting and inspiring search! I don’t feel as if I have come to a point where I could put it all at rest. Which keeps me going, curious for whatever idea might linger just around that next corner. 

3.) Why do I do what I do?

A constant need to be ‘making things’ with my hands had been with me all my life, and turned into a serious occupation with textile art at a critical phase in my life. In the manner of addiction, I need to be working with fabrics, and I have an urge to express myself in this medium on a different level than ‘only’ traditional patchwork patterns. As much as I like seeing them in well-made antique quilts, the necessary mode of expression for me was in contemporary, self-designed art quilts. I dye my own fabrics, and use them exclusively, which gives my quilts a special colorization. Making, handling, and then piecing the fabrics into a finished piece are the different stages of a complete process, which gives a special kind of satisfaction. And the greatest joy after making them is when somebody decides that they like this piece well enough to put it up on their wall for them to look at regularly.

4.) How does my writing/working process work?

I have different processes, that may either be employed entirely separately, or in combination.

As the title of the exhibition “Inspiration Bauhaus” suggests, the pieces on display in October have been created with orientation to letting myself be inspired by Bauhaus philosophy. I had decided that I would not look at the famous Bauhaus artists’ work as inspiration, but rather chose to let myself be influenced by the clear geometric forms, and the colors used to represent them, and then see where my own work would take me from there.

With my series “Play of Lines”, I was originally inspired by line drawings of my son, then aged 2 ½ and 3, and have included other linear inspirations in later stages of the series. The relatively young series “Text messages”, of course, always has a text or some textual aspect as inspiration through which I want to express something, or want the viewer to experience a special text in a new manner.

Sometimes it has happened that I had a special piece of fabric which desperately called to be me to work with it, and have gone from there.

Thank you, Frauke, for inviting me to participate. It has indeed been an interesting process to actually put into words things I have been thinking about my mode of working.

And these are my three nominees:

1. Jim Martin

I first met Jim, an American now living in Stuttgart, Germany, during my studies at the university of Freiburg. 

We shared common interests in Music and English Literature, and I always liked talking to him before class, at the cafeteria or somewhere in the halls. He got married to a good friend of my best friend, and she kept me vaguely informed about Jim and Bianca's whereabouts. We got back in touch via facebook a few years ago, and I have been following his blog on his photography and writing/texts for a while. 

Jim has just had an exhibition in Freiburg, and I hope will have more, soon. His blog is called "Jim's Photoblog", and I am certain you will enjoy looking at it or even following it.

2. Kathleen Loomis

Kathleen Loomis has been a good friend since we first met at a Master Class workshop at Nancy Crow's Barn, back in 2008.

When I saw her show one of her postage quilts to another participant at the workshop - not this one, but a green one -

Kathleen Loomis, Spaghetti Sauce

I was stunned. And a bit worried about her state of mind. The latter soon changed, as we started a regular e-mail exchange on machine quilting, became partners in daily art projects, have spent a vaction together on the Outer Banks Islands in North Carolina, and she has come to visit me in Germany. I am even now the proud owner of one of her postage stamp quilts. Kathleen makes quilts, but has done some other fabulous art work in paper, photo, junk art, and other areas. (I keep trying to get her to start doing something with the dumpsters she photographs, but she has been rather resilient about that so far.)
Her blog art with a needle is the blog where she writes about art, and is THE blog on top of my list. On her blog Kathy's Daily Art she posts pictures of her current Daily Art projects, and here she does not want to have any text. So basically I am cheating a bit, as I am recommending two blogs by one nominee - Kathy will post her answers to the questions on art with a needle. But I strongly suggest that you take a look at the Daily Art!

3. Yasmin Sabur

Yasmin Sabur is the one of the three nominees whom I have not met personally, and I have been following her blog/facebook entries for only a few months now. 

She makes wearable art, prints fantastic fabrics, and whenever I see a new picture of her work, I start drooling...

Her blog is still relatively new on my reading list, but has been an interesting addition, especially in combination with her posts on facebook.

I hope you all will enjoy looking at these blogs - and don't forget to check out what Frauke's other two nominees had on their mind!

Statistics - and?

I don’t do this often, but five days ago I checked the various statistics that blogger offers for those writing a blog. And I was touched to see that my blog has had visitors from 117 countries so far. Ok, not very frequently from every country, and perhaps not even very recently – e.g. the one and only visitor from Guatemala stopped by on January 15, 2012 at the tail-end of the list. And, to be honest, twenty of the positions list only a single click in total. But just two places ahead of Guatemala , a one-time-visitor from “Bonair, Saint Eustatius and Saba” had clicked my site on July 9, 2014, very recently. I admit, I had to look up that one – an island in the group of the ABC Islands off the coast of South America, politically a special municipality of the Netherlands (English article on Wikipedia here, German article on Wikipedia here).

Map of location of Bonaire, taken from here 

photo of Bonaire from space, taken from here

You learn something everyday. Of course it set me wondering – a quilter on a tropical island? Or just a drive-by click which will not be repeated?

I decided I wasn’t going to be frightened by the fact that this list is compiled ‘for me’ whether I call for it or not, available at a click. And certainly I could find out a lot more about the whereabouts of the visitors if I only knew more about computers and the ways of the internet than I do, merely a simple-minded user on the surface. Perhaps I could even identify that person on Bonaire, get in touch. (Now wouldn’t I like to be invited to teach on a tropical island – that thought is so tempting, I would definitely be willing to make special allowances in terms of payment... But who has heard of a quilter’s guild on Bonaire? Please, do come forward!)

Position 56 – 10 clicks in total, the last one in February 2013 – obviously knows a lot more about hiding their digital traces than I do, because that position did not show the name of a country in the first column of the table. Though how do I assume that is just one person? No telling, at least for me.

And do I understand why the one and only click from Ethiopia (position 100) of June 2012 is ranked so much higher than the recent one from Bonaire? Sorry, I don’t.

The top two positions – USA, going on 8,000 clicks, and Germany, going on 7,000 – are the countries where I have spent the most time of my life. Followed by so many others I would love to spend (more) time in – although, unpleasantly enough, the current financial and family situation does not allow me to concoct as many travel plans as I would like to. Not that I think I want to spend my life as an island hopper – but then, why not? (Curiously enough, there is not the expected entry for this to be found on Wikipedia or Google as such – I thought I had once heard that there are people who ”collect” islands by trying to visit as many islands in their life-time as possible, but obviously I am not searching for this occupation/hobby/competition with the right term. So do 'they' not know everything, or is it me?)

As you can gather, I am not a learned statistician whose analysis can get any more in-depth or telling than this. It is past 11 p.m., I am waiting for the washing machine to do its last preliminary rinse/spin before I can set the full cycle going for the second color of the upcoming collection of the fabric club, and really all I want to be doing is go to bed... But position 18, New Zealand, with 99 clicks, most recently on the first of this month, can count itself lucky, because that is the country next on my list for international travels NOT connected to quilting. November 2015. Can’t wait!

One of my top favorite places in the world:
Lake Wanaka, South Island

Still wish I had collected more driftwood there...
but kind of hard to transport washed-out logs on a bike!

But looking at the statistics of visits to one’s blog at least gives one a feeling of being connected to the world. Perhaps this feeling of connectedness will eventually prevail over the feeling of the last few days that, as the centennial of the declaration of war in 1914 is coming up, humankind does not seem to have learned anything and is doing it all over again? I hope so.

Thanks for every click to each and every one of you – I do appreciate your stopping by!

Contribution to "Decorating with Textiles"-Series on TAFA-blog

On the TAFA-Blog, you can find my contribution to the current "Decorating with Textiles"-series on the blog. Please check it out here.

Getting ready for Art Immersion

My fabric supplier in the Netherlands has an annual house fair on the last Sunday and Monday of August. So far I had never been there, but this time they were also offering a workshop on how to employ social media for the enhancement of one’s business. As I have been a more or less reluctant user of social media so far, but had been told I need to be more active on that field, I thought it  would be interesting to participate. A few conferences with my husband and my son regarding the possibilities of organizing such a trip in the middle of school vacation while my husband has to work, and we came up with a special arrangement.

On Sunday I took my son to visit his grandparents for a few days, hopped on the train and went up to Holland to take part in the workshop. And thanks to my husband’s suggestion “but you are not just going up there to do this one workshop!” I will add two more days up there and do some interesting art stops.

I was lucky to have chosen the quiet day of the house fair to be there, and could leisurely stroll through the stacks and stacks of bolts of fabrics. No longer am I tempted by these, as I do not employ commercially printed fabrics in my quilts any more. But it is still breathtaking for any fabric lover to have this abundance of supplies lieing in front of you.

I did fill a shopping cart with lots of other items, though - batting, pins, two bolts of black fabric for the classes in Amish Quilting that I will be teaching in the fall, and everything will be shipped home.

The workshop was interesting, and I do feel that I know a bit more about facebook now. Not nearly enough to feel as if I am a competent user, but… Being a data-sceptical German, however, and especially in the midst of the current and heated debate about spying out of online communication by various secret services, I still don’t feel like I will ever come to love facebook. But I blog (and I like doing that!) – I use the internet for other things – so I guess there is no way out, one has to howl with the pack.

I was never expecting to boost my self-consciousness through being a member (which a recently published study says doesn’t work anyway), rather I had joined to find a few lost friends. And it worked indeed. I do enjoy reading pabout activities of my friends that I might not have heard of otherwise – Annie posted a list of desserts she was making for ‘a few friends’ that sounded like she was hosting a batallion of football players. But I wonder why people feel the need to share cutesy images of kittens rolled up in a tulip, and would rather live without some of the wise sayings that are being shared all over the place… Fills up one’s screen and feels a bit like spam mail in your e-mail in-box.

So after this workshop I know it is time to really figure out how to use facebook to promote my fabrics and my art.

But today and tomorrow I will dedicate myself to museums, totally.

Freedom of speech

This is, as anybody who has read entries here before has realized, not a political blog. Of course, I do have opinions on political issues, some of them are even very strong opinions, and I cast my vote in general and other elections. I try to ride my bike wherever possible, buy more and more organically grown food, and I carry toads across the street in spring to save them from being squished by cars. But these opinions are not at the core of what I write about here.

Nevertheless, in these not quite two years of writing a blog I have repeatedly realized that writing a blog can be a serious political activity. Not only because I have written about Ai WeiWei’s blog as a book and imprisonment, and voiced an opinion on the apparent injustice of treatment he has received from his government.  I have witnessed the numerous Arab revolutions from a looker-on’s perspective and am worried about the various kinds of effects the developments in these countries may have on people’s lives. Did the Egyptian demonstrators really want the kind of government they are now getting, just to mention only one example? How are the new Arab governments going to affect women’s lives in these countries – women who demonstrated for more liberty in their lives?

And I have followed the reports on developments in Russia – how is it possible that a one-minute-performance by a (female) punk band in a church which used the text genre of prayer, “praying” for the removal of the current head of state, can be the reason for a Stalin-style trial?

"Pussy Riot" in glass cage at their trial in Russia -
photo downloaded from spiegel.de

The right to freedom of speech is a political right which is not granted to everybody in a manner as I have been lucky to experience. I admit that I have a rather critical opinion about many things happening in Germany, but I do value and appreciate the basic right to freedom of speech that is granted to me and every other citizen by our constituion. And blogging, even about minor  and seemingly unpolitical things, is a means of putting this basic right into action.

I have had an experience where somebody called me on the phone about a blog entry, blaming me for causing another person harm in her job. How could I do this, and I must be more considerate about other people’s situations, strongly requesting that I remove that specific entry entirely. At first I was taken aback – of course I do not want to harm anybody through anything I write on this blog. So I went back to that particular entry and checked everything I had written. I had to conclude that the difficulties the caller referred to must have been caused by the malfunctioning situation of the particular person’s working situation, namely that she and her superior just did not get along. Nothing I had written could possibly be taken as harmful to that particular person by any outsider, but had been severely twisted around to be harmful for her. I had not criticized her personally, I had not mentioned her name, all I had done was that I had mildly criticized the museum she was working for as a freelancer for not making the most out of some of their items on display. In the end, I did not change any part of the entry except that I removed one picture.

This took place on a very small scale only – but in hindsight I realized that somebody was trying to interfere with my right to freedom of speech. Even if I had raved about the quality of that person’s work, said that I did not like her, perhaps even mentioned her name, it would still have been my personal right to express that opinion. And I don’t really need to be diplomatic about something I don’t like if I don’t feel like it – in most instances I would, however, probably try to formulate criticism in a not-too-blunt manner. Nobody should have dared call me up to try and bully me into removing the post from the blog. Instead, there is an opportunity to execute their personal right to freedom of speech by leaving a comment in the comment box, which might lead to an open discussion about certain issues.

Simply writing a blog is a political activity, even if it is a blog about something as un-political as quilts and my personal experiences with art. I am deeply grateful to have this opportunity of voicing my opinion, no matter how much or how little importance this particular opinion may have, without having to fear to be thrown into jail for many years, or put under house-arrest for one year. Thank you to every single reader – because by reading what I write you show that there also exists that other side to the right to freedom of speech: the freedom to hear/read other people’s opinions so that you can enrich and broaden your own.

First anniversary of writing a blog

Towards the end of my former life as a linguist I witnessed a lot of discussion about the textual qualities of so-called „Hypertexts”. There was quite some dissent about the fact whether they were texts at all, or whether they qualified as ‘literature’. After all, they did not appear in print, thus would never have a definite and final form such as a last edition, they could be continuously altered, and different readers might read them in a different order, thus they would never be able to have a similar reading experience of the ‚same text’. At that time, being on the way out of linguistics, I did not really pay a lot of attention to those discussions, nor did I take hypertexts seriously. I thought they were a soon-to-disappear fad. A couple of years later I heard that people had started writing blogs, and had a hard time understanding what that was – nor could I really grasp why somebody would want to write an “internet diary” for public readership, as they were sometimes called in German.

In 2008 Jayne Willoughby Scott told me during a conversation at Nancy Crow’s farm that she had heard of the advice to artists that they should certainly write a blog for potential customers or followers. Still, I wondered whoever would sit down and read that. Then Bonnie Bucknam

started writing a blog on her Guatemala-bound-project (and let me know about it) and I started reading it sort of regularly. Through this blog I discovered others, such as the interesting and well-written blog by former journalist Kathy Loomis or the very instructive blog on 365 patterns for machine quilting, and I finally began to realize that it could be fun reading other people’s blogs, and that it might actually make sense to write one’s own.

So when I started preparations for my fabric-club for hand-dyed fabrics just about a year ago I knew I wanted to combine that with a blog that related to my dyeing experiences, and the various shipments of the club. Accordingly, the first posts on my German blog were all fabric-club-related.

Parallel I wanted to let my international friends and contacts who do not know any German know about what was going on in my quilting life. However, for ease of reading I did not want to write a bilingual blog. So I decided that the German blog would be more dyeing-oriented (in principle), and the English blog more concerned with my various experiences with art – my own, and art by others. I figured that would make it more interesting for me, too, because I feared that always writing the sort of same text in two languages would become boring for me. So you can find different types of entries on my two different blogs, although they do coincide every once in a while. For example, my Daily Art Projekt „Daily Oak“ appears only on the English blog.

Slowly the number of registered followers grew – to my husband’s surprise. Not surprised at the fact that the number grew slowly, but that anybody would care to read what I was writing about... Meanwhile he, too, has bookmarked the site and  has turned into an occasional reader.

Over the year I slowly got acquainted with the different types of functions that blogger provides. Most likely I still don’t know about all of them, but it’s always good to have something left to discover. Already after six months I realized that it was possible to save posts for a later publication. Which is nice if you want to keep a possible gap due to absence with uncertain access to the internet at a minimum, but can be rather stressful if you have to prepare and write several posts in advance.

I’m still learning what it means to write a blog, too. What is a good topic – would this be interesting enough to let others read about this? Do I really have something interesting or noteworthy to say about this? ... But I have found that it is a motivation to educate oneself about some topics that I might not have tackled or bothered about, had I not been writing a blog.

During the workshop in Falera I realized for the first time that there are actually people out there reading my blog who have not registered themselves as followers, when some people started talking to me about some of the posts. And in August blogger changed their design for writing. I am somebody who is rather slow in embracing changes in relation to computer stuff, once I have got myself used to one design, but I tried out their new design pretty much immediately. So I discovered that it was possible to view statistics of how may people have looked at a blog on a particular day. What a surprise – there were actually quite a number of people out there reading my blog! A chart of the number of readers throughout the last week might look like this:

It does matter – seeing these charts did have an effect on how I feel about writing my blogs (not that I didn’t care before, but to see that people actually do read it is a really nice feeling). So at this point I would like to thank all of you out there who care enough to check out once in a while what I have to tell. It’s good to know you are out there! 

I myself am curious as to how this blog is going to develop, I am certain that there are still a lot of topics out there that will catch my attention at some point. Looking forward to new postings...