Plans.

Have I mentioned before that one of the life lessons I have learned is that plans are there (mostly) to be changed? (I know I have, it’s a purely rhetorical question.)

Another incident has happened recently which has reinforced this lesson. Fortunately, it was only minor, none of the seriously upsetting things as have been happening in this current-hopefully-soon-past year.

The most recent change of plans is related to this year’s continuing challenge of the 20 Perspectives group. Different from our first challenges, we agreed that this year we would each be working three pieces to the same theme, “Conversing with the Earth”. This decision took us a long time, we were considering ‘Conversation with Earth’, but one member thought that this phrase might be copyrighted because a charity of that name exists. Then there were discussions about the article – what difference are we expressing when we insert the article ‘the’ or not?

Once we had decided on the topic, I knew exactly what piece of fabric I wanted to use, and I have written about the first piece in the mini-series before.

Then life took over, I didn’t finish on time for our June group reveal, and I had to start packing up my studio and life for the move. We have unpacked most of our boxes, my new studio has been put into some kind of working mode, even though it is far from well-organized or tidy yet. But I have managed to do a little bit of sewing, including finishing the first piece for Conversing with Earth. (Minus part of the binding at this particular point in time, and the sleeve.)

 

By now I have already missed out on the second reveal in the series, and here is where the change of plans comes in. Originally, I had thought I would make all three pieces with mudcloth. Apart from the piece I used in the first quilt in the series I have a few more pieces that I acquired from a friend and that are similar enough to the piece I had brought home from South Africa. I imagined it would give unity to my three quilts, clearly marking them as a mini series. But when I pinned the fabrics for planning the next piece onto the design wall, their arrangement and collaboration spoke to me so strongly that it became clear within a split second that I could not cut this piece of mudcloth down to the size requirements of the 20 Perspectives series. It is demanding to be something else.

 

There are a few small remnants of the mudcloth, yes, but they haven’t spoken strongly to me yet so that I could come up with a good design idea. There should also be yet another piece around somewhere, in opposite color orientation – a bit of black marks on off-white background, which I remember seeing when I packed up everything. It was going to have been a major feature in my third quilt of the series. However, it hasn’t reappeared from the boxes yet. I could spend hours searching for it by going through my fabric boxes again and again (I have looked into every single one already!) – or I could wait for it to reappear by itself, which, certainly, will only happen after the next and final reveal date.

Hence, a change of plans is called for. I started cutting up a piece of hand-printed fabric I received as a gift from Jan Soules, also a member of 20 Perspectives, last year when we met in California.

Dolores Miller, me, Deb Cashatt, Kris Sazaki, Jan Soules (from left)
at our outing in California last year November

Then I started combining it with another piece that had already been worked on a bit and was included in my mother’s complete fabric selection she handed over to me recently. 

 

Right now it is simmering on the design wall while I had another stint at my work place, I will return to it tomorrow. Curious, what it will develop into.

Back in Africa - well, almost.

What kept me sane during those terrible two weeks at school was stitching in the evenings. I did a lot of knitting, and some sewing on projects which I have found out I must not post about anymore before the deadline that I am making them for. And I have been slowly catching up on my temperature quilt which I started in April and immediately fell behind with because so many other things were and are going on. (Until very recently I hadn't even taken any pictures.)

For one thing, in a typical Uta-manner I made it a bit too over-intellectual when I decided to do not only highest and lowest temperature of the day, but, due to the pattern I had set my mind on, the averages of highs and lows of the four days represented in the entire block AND the long-range-averages as well.

It looks good – well, I think it does – and by now I have sort of come into a rhythm and know what I am doing. But it is slow going, I keep getting confused about the averages – and I had not realized before beginning that there would be so much going on in the range of 10 to 14 degrees Celsius. I had to add new fabrics because the ones I had picked were running out, which of course adds to the variety. Finally, today, I have caught up to my first days in South Africa.

(Yes, I know, that is still quite a bit behind, but by far not as much as a week ago!)

Which makes for the title of this post… and I finally read Lyric Kinard’s blog posts about our days in Johannesburg, where she has posted many nice pictures and written about our lovely evenings in the ‘international hut’ on campus.

The group of international quilters who were staying in the same house during the festival became to be friends and we are thinking about preparing an exhibition together, certainly with some quilts that are using some of the fabrics we bought when we were being taken on our textile tour of Johannesburg. For that I have been thinking what I want to do, using a piece of mud cloth I picked up from the remnant bag when we all went wild at Amatuli’s .

I thought I knew where I was heading as I was going to add some red and then stitch some text onto it. 

Then I found this piece of leftover linen from a former jacket of my husband’s (in the picture on the left) and was wondering whether this would be more in line with the quality of weave of the mudcloth than the red linen, which is much finer…and only until I did a bit of digging in the garden today, working on the compost heap, and there surfaced a piece of cloth that seems to have been hidden in that heap for a while. 

I did not put it there on purpose. Honestly! But it might well find its way into something. Perhaps even into the mudcloth piece, it being a special kind of mudcloth itself. I will rinse it and see what it looks like and then decide on how to proceed. Right now I can't even tell how big it is...