How to fail...

When I was getting my Masters in English Literature, I wrote a thesis “The Function of Language in Feminist Dystopias”. Amongst the four novels analyzed was Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”, 

My well-worn copy of the book, by Virago Press.

 

which at that point had not been put into film yet, that followed a little later, nor had Netflix been invented and the series that everybody rages about now been made.

About a year and a half after writing the thesis, I had the opportunity to go to a reading by Atwood, and in the aftermath, of course, went to have a book signed. 

 

I told her that I had written a thesis on the Tale, she replied ‘Did you?’ and immediately turned to the next person in line. I was, perhaps understandably, mildly taken aback at the utter lack of interest on her side. It took me a while to overcome this reaction, which I considered a severe rejection of my groundbreaking discoveries. (Nevertheless, I did continue reading her books and enjoying her wonderful style. And went ahead and bought her newest book of stories just as it came out recently.)

Only rather recently did I understand that she was probably getting that kind of information about fifty times at every single reading she was doing, and then finally the intelligent me went on to figure out that if I had written a very successful novel I probably wouldn’t be terribly interested in hearing what any literature student who came along would analyze into it either. So I have forgiven her for the rebuff and made my inner peace with her. This was also partly due to a long radio documentary on Margaret Atwood on Deutschlandfunk radio that I listened to. It featured a lot of her original voice, even though it had the fault of voice-over translation, but nevertheless there was enough of her wit and spirit to catch beyond the translations. I have been following Margaret Atwood on Instagram (@therealmargaretatwood), and there she pointed out recently that she had started a Substack, so now I follow her there as well (In the Writing Burrow). On Substack she mentioned that she had been interviewed by ElisabethDay for her ‘wildly successful’ podcast ‘How to Fail’. While I was waiting for the episode with Atwood to be published I listened to a number of episodes with those celebrities whom I had heard about before (such as Jane Goodall, GretaThunberg, Tom Daley, Bernadine Evaristo, and others) , going backwards in time, plus a few others that happened to come up when one episode was finished while I was driving and couldn’t switch to another program.

Hearing about so many kinds of events that could be considered failures in people’s lives, but that ‘ultimately make us better’, of course, made me think about my own failures. And how I would talk about them should I be interviewed for that podcast, which won’t happen, because I am not a celebrity of any kind. Quilting related (somewhat), these three failures of mine could be mentioned (Day always asks her interviewees to provide three failures that are then talked about, though not exclusively, in the episode).

I am a complete failure at self-promoting, and therefore never managed to really get my ‘business’ for longarm quilting commissions off the ground. Although I had fallen in love with the machine, and enjoyed using it as such, I really did not enjoy quilting for others. The machine was in a small room, which was completely blocked by it and my husband finally mildly pressured me to pass the machine on to a friend. Where I can still use it when I want, but I have to make time to travel there, can’t just hop up the stairs and quilt for an hour, and, of course, I have lost the bit of practice I had attained. Last week I did go to her place and quilted my temperature quilt, which is bound to be shown in exhibition in May and still needs some work. 

 

A lot of things went wrong, including that I failed to pack the batting I had chosen, had to go out to buy some at the local store, which was of a completely different quality and forced me to change the planned ‘destination’ of the quilt. It will be a quilt to put on the wall. Ripping out 24 circles followed, and the realization that the lack of practice leads to a less satisfactory appearance in the end. Oh well – it will appear in public once, and then be a private thing.

 

 After all the work that went into handsewing the blocks, however, there is a bit of a disappointment to be felt, I admit.  

Second failure: Last year I learned that SAQA was putting out a call for an exhibition “Color in Context – RED”, and really wanted to enter. I have an idea, I have collected things and fabric that were going to go into this quilt – but I failed to even start it. By now the deadline is well past, the entrants have been chosen. I have heard that there were around 500 entries, out of which approx. 46 were chosen. At least this failure saved me from failing to get into the show. And I can still start at some point, without the pressure to meet a deadline because I do want to make that quilt.

Third failure: Recently I finished the top for my son’s 18th birthday quilt. This is supposed to be more grown-up in appearance than the one he himself designed when he was smaller and I had finished a lot of HSTs in blue and orange, and he wanted a quilt for himself.

 

For this new top I had fabric printed on demand with a photo of a piece of paper with his handwriting on it. The design is nothing fancy, just using the Free Wheeling Single Girl template set by Denyse Schmid once more, to make them their money’s worth. 

 

It’s a wonderful top, nothing of a failure here – but sometimes I feel like I have failed to install some of my personal values in my son’s brain. Of course, he is a different generation than I am, has grown up in a completely different world than I did, and it is not that he is a troublemaker or drug addict or anything of the kind. He is a good ‘big boy’ now, he still talks to me (sometimes), although it feels like it is hard to reach into his inner thoughts, he is finding his way. In a manner that is quite different from especially my husband’s imagination of how the son should be going about, then the husband laments about this to me, which increases my feeling of failure, although I figure the boy just needs a bit more time, he will be a great success at some point. But he’d rather take the car anywhere than go by bike – I strongly prefer to take the bike anywhere I can possibly go rather than taking the car, he is, as I said, finding his way. And I am failing at being patient, letting him go at his own pace. What can I do about this? Keep calm, quilt on, and have another go at the longarm for his quilt, hopefully without major catastrophes this time.

Fourth extension... and fourth completion (minus binding)

When the year began I was all psyched up that I would not let the lockdown wear (or psychologically lock) me down, I had planned to post regularly, and not whine about lockdown, corona, whatever. Just concentrate on living an as-good-as-possible life under the current conditions. But three weeks of home-schooling for the nursing course and the developments with the EU-vaccine disaster shut me up. I just couldn't write and not write about these issues, I was so upset. It can't be changed, though, and all my worries about my sons' generation, the economy especially for smaller shops and restaurants which are still closed, although they persist, they don't belong here. So...

Yesterday I finished a quilt top, completion #4 of the year. I had started it about a year ago after I had received Denyse Schmidt's templates for the "Free Wheeling Single Girl" pattern I had seen on Instagram. Of course, the 2019 sew-along was over by the time I became aware of the pattern, and I am not good at sew-alongs anyway. So I got started, liked the ease of how well the pieces came together, determined to use up old workshop samples that never got anywhere - and had another UFO, which stalled when the virus hit. I had tried out different arrangements of the block at first, none of which really satisfied me, though.

Other projects intervened, but when I came across the box after Christmas I made up my mind to get this one finished relatively quickly. I stuck with the original arrangement of the blocks, although I think the off-set arrangement as in the last picture above might be very attractive as well, in another color arrangement.

It was the final top to be quilted on my longarm while it is still in my house, as it is going to move to another place soon.

Now it only needs the binding.

Meanwhile lockdown has been extended yet again, until March 7th. Hairdressers are allowed to open on March 1st. I know many people think hairdressers are very important, but for me some other things would have been more urgent. It is frustrating ... but today the sun is shining and I will go for a long walk in the snow.

How to Make An African Quilt (Diary of recovery!)

This post was mostly written before the SAQA Europe/Middle East regional zoom meeting yesterday evening. The meeting did not have a specific topic to begin with, but the Rep’s guiding question of ‘to do and not to to lists’ got the group talking about how we are feeling in these times of uncertainty, pandemic and everything that comes with it – lockdowns, restrictions, canceled opportunities to exhibit, to travel and to meet at venues, or workshops that had to be postponed, perhaps for a repeated time. And during that conversation I realized that the making of the African quilt that I describe in the following lines is right down that path many of us mentioned – we want to be making, but we are somewhat blocked about making art. Quite a few of us have turned to making ‘functional quilts’, at least temporarily. While I have always made a functional quilt in between or alongside art quilts, it has become more difficult to make art quilts during the past few months, and having completed this African quilt was a good step for me and my well-being.

During the last few years I have been in close contact with a few African refugees (West Africa – Senegal) here in our town, and have learned a lot from them. A better appreciation of rain, for example – “rain’s a blessing” said Mariama once when I was complaining about a rainy grey and ugly fall day as we have so many in Germany. Or that we should take things with a lighter heart, a repeated suggestion from my special protegé – but I admit that that is a theoretical knowledge on my part only (so far?) - I am not good at taking things easy. Although I am much better at it when my African friends are around who make me laugh! It is always amazing how they refuse to be brought down by the difficulties they encounter in the ‘person’ of German bureaucracy and legislation, how they maintain a smile on their face, how they easily make one laugh and are always good to crack a joke, or tell us that everything is fine (although I know by the date of the month how far the ‘water level’ in their wallet is gone down).

And I have looked at fabrics from Africa differently, too. I am in a process of using a piece of mudcloth I brought back from South Africa last year (my, that’s long ago! we could travel!). And I have another piece of mudcloth that is biding its time for a good idea an be an accomplice to this one.

 

I recently finished a quilt from a large piece of West African fabric I acquired at Festival of Quilts from the wonderful AfricanFabric Shop  where I always go when I get to FoQ. I have bought a beautiful basket from them, too – not a good idea before going home on the plane, but I managed.

So when one of my African friends complained that his room in the refugee accomodation, very small but his very own, was so cold because it has three walls that go to the outside of the house and the heating system is not exactly up to modern standards, I went ahead and started making him a quilt. It needed to be done quickly, and he has a slightly different preference for colors than I do, so I relied on that African fabric as the main ‘backbone’ for a free cut drunkard’s path, which you can see in the lower part of the picture.

 

Of course, it wasn’t entirely enough, I added another indigo-dyed West-African fabric as accocmpaniment, as can be seen in the upper half of the picture.

This is a picture as I was putting the blocks together:

 

I put together a back fabric from several different fabrics and a superfluous block from the front.

 

And I used my circular quilting templates for the quilting (only the 4” template hasn’t resurfaced yet).

 

The finished piece looks like this:

Of course, it is not strictly speaking an African quilt. It is a quilt made from a few fabrics that originated in Africa, and it was made for a friend from Africa, but everything else about it just makes it a quilt blanket like any other quilt blanket. But a nice one, the recipient likes it and feels warmer sleeping under it. And life goes on, even as we are confined to a new ‘lockdown’ (light version).

Quilting as exercise (Diary of recovery but I am not counting anymore)

A title like that probably makes most of us think of taking a piece of scrap fabric, layering a sandwich and then going about some free motion quilting exercises, or just a sample block to get experience with a certain pattern. Well, let me tell you, you are wrong!
Currently I am quilting that quilt I am not writing about here anymore and I am using a gadget for the first time which I have had since I got the longarm, but just never used, the channel locks, to make straight lines. It will be an irregular grid. But! The unhappy setup of my machine in a room where you can't walk around it makes it necessary that for every time I rearrange the locks I need to do a knee bend, take out the locks, get up, reposition the machine, knee bend to reposition the locks.

That is exercise, I tell you!
Just as well that my vacation on the North Sea had been at a hotel where I went to two yoga sessions a day. Which did not necessarily include knee bends, but it helps, I am sure. So right now I have finished the grid lines in one orientation, and have turned the quilt - another something I haven't done since owning the machine. Planning to start on the lines in the cross direction soon, perhaps today.
This quilt is finished only after a long wait for my big machine, which I patiently endured, first without substitute solutions because the shop kept ensuring me 'it will be done the next one in line'. After three days of that I'd had enough and put up a makeshift arrangement with the smaller machine I have.

When that had been up for a day I finally got the call that I could come and fetch the big one, and then it was a herculean task to put the top together that I am not writing about anymore. Unfortunately, the longarm doesn't like the pieces of reflective fabric that are included in there, and when I had realized that the thread breakings were due to that I started interrupting the lines at the reflective pieces. Now I will have lots of threads to sink. Which I would have had with the breakings, too, but at least this way it saves me the rethreading of the needle, and the serendipity of it happening.

What else has happened? When I went for walks on the beach, I picked up plastic and trash, although I have to say it was not quite as bad as it could have been. Perhaps due to the fact that this was a sandy beach with a lot of difference between high and low tide, the water might just take everything with it that it has deposited?

Contens of my plastic-collecting bag (yes, a plastic bag, too, but after that I used
my fabric bag)

At one point I dug out a plastic jug, probably for 3/4 gallon (3 liters), which was filled with sand and water and had been submerged under the sand, extruding only with a small corner. It was so heavy that I would have had a hard time carrying it all the way to the next trash can (there weren't many on the beach!). Luckily, a kite buggy teacher was just packing up his gear a couple of hundred yards away and I gave it to him, asking him to put it in a bin, and then continued my walk.

But it has been over a week since I have come back. I spent a good time at my spinning wheel recently, too, because I had joined a team for the Tour de Fleece with the Tour de France, and this is a large part of my results:

I signed up for QuiltCon together.

And I am trying not to worry too much about irresponsible behaviour of German tourists abroad and underreflected people at home, infection numbers here are rising. At the beach I had been mildly impressed at people's discipline about standing in line, something which used not to be a strong habit in German culture.

But despite the fact that Germany so far has done so well in terms of maintaining it all, people's patience is waning fast. They don't believe it's real because 'so few infections'. I just keep listening to that book on the Spanish Flu and hope that our sanity will prevail. Although I do see the problem with trying to maintain an infectious disease in the way we are doing it now does overtax people's patience. With the Spanish Flu, it ravaged, many died, and then it was over. The way we are trying to do it, it will stay with us for so long - or we have to let it run its course. Interstingly enough, health systems as we have them now exist partly due to that experience of the Spanish Flu - and they are overwhelmed if the measures aren't taken as well. One sentence in that book rings in my mind constantly. It goes somewhat like 'it is not a question whether we are going to have another flu pandemic. It is just the question what kind of world it will be that is struck by it.' Well, it's not a flu, but any virulent virus can do the trick...

Many years later...

Where exactly is the line between naming a quilt that is not finished (yet) a WIP or a UFO? This is a philosophical question of utmost importance, I think. Certainly, when you know you won’t finish it because you just don’t like what you have done, then it could be considered a UFO – but wouldn’t it be more honest to call it a Never-to-be-finished something, or an error?

How many projects do we all have in our boxes, drawers, bags that we don’t even exactly remember anymore but still sort of assume we will finish some day? For a while now I have been pulling bits and pieces from my boxes which are more or less finished fragments, leftovers and cut-offs that are neither enough to make something from (except for little bags and stuff, which is definitely not my thing) nor interesting enough to pursue as a work that might be finished eventually. The idea is that perhaps I could just throw them together and make a very wild picknick blanket. But I might also send them to a group of women who are making cushions for cancer patients and who have asked my for scraps and leftovers. 

But those pieces that one still wants to finish… I have been working on a top for years which was inspired by my absolute favorite quilt I ever saw in an exhibition in Raleigh, NC that used the Underground Railroad/Jacob’s Ladder pattern. (See a picture of the flyer here. That's the only picture I have of that quilt.) Of course, I would have wished to make a top that was as striking as my favorite, but as that one lived through the scarceness of fabrics used, I know nothing I make will ever be as good.

So for my top I  could choose colors, a layout, use my hand-dyed fabrics, and a piece of a blue multi-colored fabric dyed by Heide Stoll-Weber. It was meticulously planned, certainly an activity that is not my usual way of preparing or sewing. 

I numbered the blocks, I precut the pieces, I even marked and hand-cut them with plastic templates, no rotary cutting. And I spent a long time piecing the individual blocks, with long intermissions, periods of failing motivation, other things that needed doing. 

(at the end, of course, I was surprised by how my prechosen fabrics looked together, but luckily it was not an unpleasant surprise.)

Finally, it was finished – and I realized that several blocks had faults in the set up of the inner four-square-arrangements. 

I spent at least a year agonizing over whether I should take those sections apart and fix that. I finally did… But in a manner that made sure thatnot all the inner square arrangments had the same orientation, allowing for more variability. Then  I realized I wanted the pattern to extend out into a border and spent probably another six months before getting around to that step. 

Quilting on the longarm was easy after that – finished well before Christmas last year, and I let myself be inspired by a pantograph I had bought at the over-motivated days of my longarm acquisition, before I realised that pantographs are simply not my thing. So I freearmed a similar pattern.

Today I finally finished putting on the binding...

Nothing, compared to the inspiration, but not at all bad for a finally finished project of many years that is simply a quilt to be a quilt to snuggle up under.

Not a WIP anymore. Whew. So … what WIP is next?

Days are getting longer...

Every year just a few days into February it is noticeably that the days are getting longer. I can understand that the Catholic Church has a Light Mass on  February 2. Reflections are getting clearer, more colorful, and more obvious as the sun's rays are stronger and come from a higher angle.

Of course, on the days when I have the early shift it is still dark. But when I get out there is still some part of the day left - definitely a plus on this new job's side. I have been asked whether I prefer working the early shift or the late shift, and I haven't really been able to make up my mind. Both have their advantage. Perhaps the late shift is a bit less stressful than the early shift, and it also gives me full mornings to try to get things done. In any case, yesterday was a day off and I managed to finish quilting the EQA quilt that is being made as a joint effort by the EQA's various countries' International Representatives on the occasion of the EQA's 30th anniversary this year. Every Representative made one block in the same, the Swiss Rep (who was born in Canada) pieced them together, I agreed to do the longarm quilting, the backside fabric was donated from Poland, and the Spanish Representative who is living in Germany will put on the finishing touches.

Then there was Valentine's Day - not a day that is usually being paid much attention to in our family. But this year we had a surprise. The local newspaper called, they were writing an article about 'prominent couples' in the region, and how they had met and fallen in love. I wasn't home when they called, my husband gave them a slightly edited version of how it had really happened, and instead of receiving a card or flowers on the day itself I kept getting comments about the article in the paper. This is the photo we submitted, my son took it after I got home.

Since then, I have been to the hairdresser's, so the hair is shorter again.
Looking forward to a free weekend - with lots of stitching on my agenda. In theory...

Success?

Last week I spent a few days in a small holiday apartment south of the city of Bamberg while my son was at basketball camp. Originally we had planned to go on a three-day-bike trip right afterwards, I had the bikes in the car and while the time away stitching, spinning, reading, sleeping. When preparing everything and packing, we realized that my pretty urgent desire to reduce our consumption of throw-away plastic items that I have been following has been rather successful. I keep being reminded of the necessity to further follow that intention with determination when I see pictures like this on Instagram, on the internet, or just see plastic trash lying around when people did not dispose of their waste properly.

Screenshot from Instagram -
frightening.

Not only have I noticed that the number of bags containing plastic waste that we put out for collection has gone down quite a bit (it used to be up to 5 or 6, now it is only 2, at the most, sometimes less), but we also could not find a single plastic bag in the house in which to wrap our belongings that we would have wanted to take on the trip, to protect them from possible rain.
Bike trip experience has taught me that it is useful to do that. We left without having pre-wrapped anything, and I thought I could perhaps get (i.e. BUY) some sturdy trash bags should weather be looking grim with the danger of rain interfering with our trip. As it turns out, it has been so hot here in Germany, that we canceled the bike trip. If I had been on my own, I probably still would have gone, but my son is 13, I had hoped to introduce him to a more-than-one-day bike trip to show him how much fun it is, but with temperatures in the range of mid-30Centigrades it would have not worked. He would have hated it and me forever, so we came back home. I never needed to think about plastic bags again.

It is still very hot, with feeble attempts to stay 'cool' inside (we, this being Germany, of course don't have air conditioning). The water in the swimming pool is too warm for my taste by now, exercising outside is almost unbearable, and working on a longarm commission makes me break out in sweat.

But I finished it in record time as this is meant to be a wedding present for a wedding in ten days, and I am going to Birmingham on Wednesday.
So we are using less plastic. But we are suffering from climate change dramatically here - at least this summer. Of course, the American President has decreed that there is no such thing...

Fair and symposium

On Monday I returned from a four-day job at the h&h, the international craft and fabric fair in Cologne. Handi Quilter had asked me to join their staff on the stand for some linguistic input and I gladly accepted because I had always wanted to go to that fair just out of sheer curiosity. It was a very interesting experience, if hard work. Long days, standing on hard floor, demonstrating and explaining - I found it much harder work than standing at the stand with my own fabrics, selling, rearranging the display. I was even more tired after the days in Cologne than I ever was at the consumer fairs I have been to. The ideal package for such a job should include a one hour massage every evening!

Before the opening of the show: two of my own quilts, and one from the
70,273 Project, which I quilted, decorate the stand

Mounting a fabric for demonstration purposes

Negotiations with Chuck Fresina from Handi Quilter

I had a bit of time to look around, too, and was amazed at the importance of knitting yarns at the show. 

From what I saw, you would think everybody in the world is knitting, and a lot. With some of the design pieces I saw 

Detail of the vest above - this is crochet, I assume worked in two steps,
first a black grid, and then an overlaying second pattern.

The edges of the circles are worked with individual threads,
no threads are carried over on the inner side.

Patchwork knitting...

I did wonder who would knit that kind of a project, and even more importantly, who would go around wearing something like that.

But I was very pleased to see so many interesting and high quality yarns around. 

This company became one of my favorites - perhaps because
their stand was just opposite from ours?

Another one I really liked (and got some of their skeins at the end of the show) was  https://cowgirlblues.co.za/. Check them out, their range is marvellous! You just hope that the trend towards knitting does continue, and that these smaller companies can keep it up.

When I returned home I had a rather unpleasant surprise, however. Over the four days at the show I had not really checked my mails on the computer, only on the phone, because in the evenings I was simply too tired to open the mail program. Because of some refugee-mailing-list that I have recently joined, the incoming messages have multiplied and it has become much harder to stay on top of the stream of messages, especially on the phone. So I had missed one message which seemed rather important. The evening before I left for Cologne I had finally sent off my application for the symposium that I had briefly mentioned a while ago. On the evening before the deadline, so almost last minute. Imagine my dismay when I found a message from the organizer could I please resend my attachment because he could not open the file. Monday evening is three full days after the deadline has passed… I did resend my attachment right then and apologized for not doing so earlier, but in my heart I started building a wall against disappointment at probably not being chosen because of late entry.

Waking up on Tuesday morning, however - I slept late, until 7.30! - there was a reply already, “all is good, my wife could open it after all, you’ve been selected, we will be in touch!” What a relief, although it did take a few hours to sink in completely.

By now I have started planning and preparing and am looking forward to the event. Even though it is going to be rather risky thing. We will be working in public, under a tent, yes, but if it is pouring rain, as it can be at that time of year, we are going to be cold and miserable, and how is my machine going to like that…? I will make sure to find out whether there will be a bad-weather-option available that we could relocate to.