I did it...

Imagine you get photos made of three quilts by a professional photographer to be able to enter these quilts in a pestigious show in Germany. Patchwork Gilde Deutschland has a tri-annual juried show called "Tradition bis Moderne" (From Tradition to Modern), I have been in it a couple of times, and I even have juried it once. I wanted to finish two quilts for this show which are both still pretty far from being finished, by at some point I realized I didn't need to fret about this. I could enter others. But I needed the professional photos. Fortunately, the photographer who used to take the photos of my quilts when I was still living in that small town to the north-east of Munich had agreed that I could send the quilts in a package, he would shoot the photos, ship the quilts back and send me the files digitally.

He did send. I did download. I remember that I did. But when I finally got around to "you need to get this entry in" and it was already getting relatively close to the deadline, I could for the life of me not find the files. No memory left of what names I had attached, hard disc searches were unsuccessful, even the digital native could not help. Fortunately I still had a tiny bit of leeway and I called the photographer the next mornign and asked him to send the files again, which he kindly did.

This time I managed to keep track of where I downloaded and saved the files, was organized enought to find out whether I had to downsize the pictures, had typed up artist statements that I could just copy-paste, and got my entry in more than 2 hours ahead of time.

The show takes only one quilt per entrant, but I figured it would increase my chances to try with the three pieces of entry allowed. Now we will have to see whether one of them makes the cut.

Here are the detail shots I included in the entry.

 

Detail from "Alchemy of Textiles"

 

Detail from "The Legendary Blue NuDenim"

Detail from "The Quilt that Sewed Itself"

 

 This Blog Entry, again, has been a long time in the making. I started to write it right after New Years', mildly proud that I had managed to get the application in. But as I am still juggling between two different computers and haven't figured out my saving system yet and am unable to let go of the photo editing software that is on the old one but can't tranfer to the new one... once I have written the text, somehow it registers as 'done', but of course the pictures need to be included, and as mentioned, something was amiss with these photos.

So by now it might even be time to receive news whether either of the three was accepted. I know only one will be shown if at all. I just hope at least one makes it, disappointment would be severe if all three fell through. But then, I have juried quilts out for this show. Fittingly, the next magazine's topic is 'Rejected!' and I wrote an article on #quiltconreject. We'll see whether I learned something from it. 

 

 

 

Things on my table and my mind (Diary of recovery)

 

A couple of weeks ago Germany talked about the fifth anniversary of Chancellor Merkel’s famous words “Wir schaffen das!” (we can do that) which marked the beginning of one million refugees pouring into the country.  Although she  had only meant to take in the twenty-plus-something-thousands that were waiting at the Bukarest strain station at that time. The recent commemorations all tried to analyse what was right about that sentence or what Dr. Merkel had done wrong, give reasons for this and for that. But that's already over, by now we are in the midst of discussion rounds about the 30^th anniversary of German reunification – what went wrong, what was right, who was robbed of what, what was good in the GDR, are we really one nation, one people, … Germans seem to have a severe urge to discuss everything to shredded pieces these days, and in a negative way. Constantly journalists are pointing out what went wrong, what could have been done differently. It never seems to be worth to talk about the positive sides of things. How well many things went with one million refugees, many of which are working now. 

This attitude of talking things to death negatively is not a healthy way to deal with matters of importance, I think. But seems to be a very German approach, unfortunately. (I still think that Angela Merkel’s sentence was one of the best things she ever said, but the reaction from the then Bavarian Prime Minister and now Minister of Interior Affairs and Security spoiled it all, broke a barrier and made all the problems with right-wing extremists that we are experiencing now, possible to begin with. But I am back to trying to keep this a blog without real political issues. So no more on this.)

Definitely, these two anniversaries right on top of each other are a strong indicators, yet again, that time flies. (In a former life of mine, when I was still a linguist, this phrase would routinely draw up one of the insider jokes that live in specialist groups: “ Time flies  …. like an arrow. And fruit flies like a banana.”) I haven’t written a post in a while, but I have been continuously composing them in my mind indeed - and the longer I hadn’t written, the less feasible it seemed to come up with something coherent about stuff that is going on.

I have been to see my mother after several surgeries. I have had two wonderful weeks in a section in the hospital where I could indeed imagine myself working, if they have an opening starting next fall. I have had several rather unpleasant weeks in school, but I am counting down and there is not that much class time left to endure before the onset of exams coming July. Less than 80 days, in fact. And that is a positive things.

And I am working on this and on that. Quite a number of works in progress, each of which is biding their time, gets a bit of attention now and then and then has to recede to the background while others are being tended to. But the attention span is again on the shorter side, with worries growing again about increasing numbers of infections, demonstrations 'for liberty, against masks'... Who on earth can come up with such a stupid idea that a mask is meant to shut the population up?

The quilt I sent off on its round of entries (see post here) was already rejected once, Schweinfurth did not like it, and although I had thought it would not matter, I was a bit hurt and considered pulling it out of the circle. Originally, I had thought I would enter it for Quilt National, and Schweinfurth had just been an additional opportunity prior to that. “Forget entering”… just do my stuff as I like it and don’t bother to present it to the quilting world. But my good friend Barbara Lange just in time asked whether I had entered something for QN, and convinced me to give it a try by telling me that one quilt of hers had been rejected by the jury for St. Marie-aux-Mines but then been accepted for QN. And this conversation took place before the deadline had gone, I then really remembered to send off my entry, entry process worked easily without any problems and now the yellow scraps are waiting for their next verdict.

I have taught an online class twice in August, in the overall context of the Patchwork Gilde’s summer academy and have started preparing another on for November. It is not my favorite way of teaching, I must admit, and I am very glad that real teaching is coming up for me again in two weeks’ time. But the participants were so grateful and happy that things were happening, that they got to learn something new. Some of them even said that these new methods had given them more opportunities to participate in workshops or classed than they used to have before because they would have never been able to go to any of the ‘far away’ places where workshops are being held. They prefer having their fabrics close by, and even if a teacher out of a computer is different from a teacher on the premises, they were just glad to be sewing ‘in company’ and learning something as well. Which convinced me to pick another subject, aiming at a different group of expertise in quilting, and be a part of the ‘staff’ for another online-event the Gilde is planning for November.

I have also started ‘planning’ a quilt. 

 

Which definitely is not my usual mode of production. But as this post now is beginning to be a bit of a rambler, I think that will be a topic for another post in a few days when planning has progressed just a bit further.

And on to the carousel... (Diary of recovery)

The quilt that I am not writing about anymore is finished. I took it off the longarm a week ago.  Quilting had provided a serious problem because after the first few lines I realized that the longarm machine did not like the pieces of reflecting fabric that are included in the quilt. The thread kept breaking, and after the third or fourth time I decided, I would do that in a controlled manner. I interrupted the line at each piece of reflector fabric. However, I also decided that I did not want to do on-the-spot-securing of thread when stopping or beginning. At that point not really realizing just how many threads that needed to be sunk this method would produce. I mean, I know I had taken that decision consciously. But I did curse myself when I took the quilt off the machine – no, even earlier, when the stopping and starting again added so many more movements to be done and actions to be taken to the exercise of adjusting the locks.

And the deadline for Q=A=Q approaching, and sinking threads not being my favorite part of finishing a quilt… Definitely an activity I would outsource immediately if I had the financial means or the human resources department in the background that could deal with that!

At some point I was near to panicking and complained to Kathy about it in our mails. She wisely suggested I pull the threads to the back, proceed with the facings, have it photographed on time and deal with sinking them at a later time. This advice grounded me to a certain degree, because it made me think about how much time it would cost me to pull the threads to the back in comparison to sinking them right away. I had been smart enough to time myself for one complete process of sinking. I could do one double set of threads in one minute and 15 seconds. That was a single process which went normally well, no difficulties, tangles, breaks. So I figured make it one minute and a half to two minutes for an averaging calculation, and I briefly surveyed the number of threads left. Multiply by – and it added up to close to four hours of sinking threads. At the beginning of a hot Sunday without family disturbances – that seemed doable. And it was, by Sunday evening it was done. Now with the facings I did indeed take the liberty to finish them so far as to make a photo possible, but the sleeve and upper and lower facings still need to be attached. Nevertheless, I declare it finished.

But somehow entries and I seem to be on a strange footing – because the photographer sent me a small file only, 72 pixels, not enough MB. Which I discovered yesterday evening when I wanted to get the entry process done with. I wrote an email and could only hope that they had not messed up with the camera settings when taking the photo, and that they would be able to send me a decent file before the deadline ran out. Luckily this worked out, I have managed to register with the new entry system (compared to last time entry a few years ago), and although the system wanted to circle me through the process several times and I thought I had lost everything and would need to re-type everything, in the end it worked. (I don’t need to mention that my printer did not want to print the receipt at first, but by now I am smart enough not to close that page until I have indeed seen the correctly printed page.) I am set on entering this quilt in all the upcoming possibilities of entering, and there are at least 5 I know of currently, could be more) until it gets accepted somewhere.

Off to new horizons, though. It felt good to complete a piece, in a relatively short time, and not a small one at that (58 by 63 inches). I have started on a new idea. For one never knows – this one might be accepted right away and then I might want to have others to enter in the following calls for entry.

Bucket list?

About 10 days ago I participated in the SAQA ‘live chat’. The current president Deborah Boschert talked about the importance of having a ‘bucket list’ and that entering Quilt National is on hers this year, and then she sent us into the chat groups to talk about whatever it was that would come up.

In the first group we talked about bucket lists. What people had on theirs in terms of quilting. And I started wondering whether I still have a bucket list in terms of quilting. My general bucket list includes sailing around the world visiting a lot of the many islands we have on the planet.  Never knew whether a bucket list proper is supposed to carry items that are relatively easy and practicable to be made happen. Sailing around the world visiting many islands doesn’t seem to fall into that category, at least not without a huge inheritance coming along my way, which is not very likely to happen either. Oh well.

Living by the sea or at least on some body of water would be another point. Which again doesn’t seem very likely or possible right now, not only but also of the financial situation. So I am scaling down to spending vacation on the seaside, better than nothing. Right now, for a week, and it had been planned before the virus hit.

very windy today, although the water temperature would be feasible for swimming...

There are a number of other items I could mention that would make it onto a bucket list if I really had one, but as they all depend on the financial situation changing dramatically I think I would rather not talk about them in any kind of detail. Perhaps a bucket list should really have on the first position "be content with what you have"?

In the second chat group we did indeed talk about entering Quilt National, does one have to enter three to show that one has a consistent  body of work, did it hurt as much to be rejected from QN as from other shows, quilts that didn’t get into QN but were immediately accepted somewhere else. I have never seriously considered entering QN. Mostly because I don’t take it lightly when I get rejected, and then also because I have seen and heard so many people about how they fret about producing something for the deadline, slaving away – and then the buzz about being in or out. It didn’t sound healthy. But as the live chat finished, I began thinking about the quilt that is currently on my design wall and making (slow) progress. If the progress could be sped up and the quilting finished quickly… it might be an option. But I am not going to stress myself about it. Except for the fact that I must make sure not to post about it here right now...

Day before I went on my one week vacation I took my machine for a check up, and my work table looked really empty. 

I hope it will be finished just when I get back, and then we will see.