Operation rescue

In September I received a commission to save a much beloved slightly older quilt. Not really antique, the owner had bought it new about 25 or 30 years ago, and really used and loved it.

The fabric on the back was worn thin, and ripped at the seam.

The frontside has a nice traditionally executed Log Cabin Design, and it was tied – luckily! I don’t know which kind of memories are connected to this quilt, but it must mean a lot to the owner, because he had no hesitations when we did an approximate calculation of the costs that would arise. Those costs wouldn’t quite get him a new one, but it does give an indication what a special kind of quilt this must be to him.

He bought a grey print fabric for the new back, but was also considerate to choose one of my hand-dyed fabrics as well and suggested that I include that into the new back accroding to my decision. It was a 60-cm-piece, so something had to be done with it, and eventually I cut large squares, which were then set off from each other, mostly in one half of the back.

At first I took out the ties and removed the back.

At that point I realized that the fabric was ripped not only at the seam, but also at the points where the ties had been attached. Originally we had thought it would be possible to use the old back fabric for a new binding, in double or tripler layers, to hold on to the original look as much as possible, but with holes like this I took the liberty to decided that it needed a new fabric for the binding as well.

It also turned out that the patched front was rather faded, so I first checked back with the owner whether he had realized the degree of fading, whether he still wanted me to continue. He gave the ‘go’ signal, 

I put the quilt onto the longarm – and at that point I was beginning to feel nervous. It seemed rather parallel to my own experience with my teddy bear, which has been with me since I was less than half a year old. 

This is not the very first baby picture in which the teddy bear appears,
there is another one perhaps a couple of weeks earlier. But this is the first one in
which the teddy bear is in full view.

At some point in my life this teddy bear had assumed a rather haggard look, lost much of its stuffing, and one eye as well, so I took it to be repaired. After that it not only did not look familiar anymore, but it also had a crossed eye. That in particular hadn’t been obvious to me when the repair person and I talked about a substitute eye, which was of a different make but had seemed similar enough in appearance and direction to justify being used. 

Simply turning one of the eyes does not rectify the situation. Probably
another serious operation would be necessary, but I am not sure
 the teddy bear wants to have that done...

I didn’t complain when I picked up the teddy bear, but it took a long time for me to fully embrace this teddy bear again. And that experience now gave me hesitations before I started quilting this quilt, which, after all, hadn’t been quilted before.

I decided to keep the pattern simple, no swirls and overabundant curves, just picking up of the barn raising design with a bit of oval shapes, and straight lines in the borders.

And then the binding, for which I chose another small piece from my stash, matching in color in patchwork style – close, close enough, but not entirely the same, which was not possible.

I finished the binding yesterday evening and the owner will come and pick it up on the weekend. I am determined not to get nervous about how he likes the old teddy bear in its renovated appearance...

Coughing in Concerts

One of the two first CDs I ever owned was a recording of Felix Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Italian Symphony”. When I was a teaching assistant at Holy Cross College, a student had been kind enough to lend me a radio, because I did not have any music playing devices in my room. When he brought it over he said, “I hope you don’t mind, it comes with a CD player.” I did not mind, but I did not have any CDs, so next time I got to go off campus I bought two CDs. The one by Mendelssohn, and the other was Keith Jarrett’s “The Köln Concert”.

I have no idea why I bought the Jarrett-CD, because I did not know the recording before that, but it certainly turned out to be my favorite CD for a long time. (I did buy a few more before the year was over.) I still have it, and should it ever wear out, I would definitely look for a replacement.

Jarrett’s solo concert CDs have been an important part of my life since, and my husband is a great admirer of his quality as an improvisor as well. He knows much more about music, musicians and recordings than I do anyway. So he was the one who happened to find out that Keith Jarrett was to be make a rare concert appearance in Munich, and managed to get us tickets before they were sold out within very few days after opening of sales.

Yesterday was the date. There had appeared an article in the newspaper reminding people of how much Jarrett insists on the fact that no-one should cough or make any other interfering or disturbing noises during the performance. There was a leaflet deposited at every single seat in the huge concert hall stating in German and English how quiet you were to be because it was all being recorded, that Jarrett requested to turn off and put away all portable devices for the entire length of the concert, and not photography, please. And the manager appeared on stage in person and repeated the whole thing in so many words. Everybody understood that this was a serious issue!

My husband was well prepared – neither of us currently has a cold, but he brought cough drops nevertheless, the kind where you don’t have to unwrap anything, because that can cause distrubing noises as well.

As the lights were dimming, a cacophony of coughing started, which turned into a whole concert hall laughing, as everybody was trying to get the coughing done with beforehand. Never before had I experienced such a profound stillness between the artist sitting down at the instrument and the first notes being played! Perfect silence, not a single cough at that point. Marvellous. It can happen. Why can’t it be like that every single time at any concert?

To be honest: there were only about 20 coughs throughout the entire concert. (But every single one I noticed and was disturbed by, because I thought perhaps Mr Jarrett would now interrupt and stop playing... Overall that’s a pretty good – but it is summer, no coughing season... why any coughs at all? And too bad that people usually started applauding even before the last vibrations of the final notes had completely passed. At one point one woman even yelled “bravo” before the applause. I was a bit scared somebody would shoot her. And unfortunately somebody must have flashed during the encores because Mr. Jarrett took the pains to give a little lecture ‘to those who don’t understand’ about respecting the request to not flash during playing, asking them “Why did you come?” He even used the word that starts with an “a” and ends in “-holes” several times. I wonder whether that speech is going to be included in the CD when it’s released, or whether that will be edited out. In any case, when “Munich 2016”, or whatever will be out, it is well worth to buy that CD, if you like that kind of music. And you can hear me applauding – though not coughing, nor shouting that disturbing ‘bravo’, which can't be edited out.