SAQA Benefit Auction starts tomorrow, Friday, September 12

 

text messages 28 - 
my contribution to the SAQA Benefit Auction in 2021

For the first time in many years I have not donated a piece for the SAQA Benefit Auction this year. Despite the fact that I had collected pieces of fabric that I wanted to use right after finishing last year’s piece. But best intentions of starting it immediately after the September ’24 run of the auction were waylaid by our move, my overall state of mind throughout the last year, and, perhaps, a bit by the fact that again my piece sold for only $75. After that one-time big success when my piece sold for $750 in 2020 

text messages 25: love protect repeat, 2020

 

my style has not been terribly well liked with bidders even to the point where one piece didn't get sold at all (and I then took it back from Houston International Quiltfestival). The piece pictured above still sold, though. Add to that frustration the increasing difficulties of getting the pieces shipped to the US – price, regulations as to what you are allowed to send, and then house buying, planning the move…

(And now how are we ever going to get a quilt to the US for such an auction? If SAQA doesn’t figure out a way how to collect the European donations and clandestinely transport them to the US, I wonder whether it is going to break their financial possibilities? I need to find out about their plans for that…)

At least I wanted to post a personal dream collection before bidding starts tomorrow, but I can’t seem to access their site. So all I can do right now is to give you the link:

https://events.handbid.com/auctions/2025-saqa-benefit-auction/items

Hope it works tomorrow – please support SAQA if you can by bidding on a quilt. And perhaps I will again contribute to the auction next year, who knows. But somehow my hopes aren’t high on this issue.

I think I (sort of) hate this quilt.

This past August I was invited to join the ‘Voyage’ International Textile Artists Group and immediately said yes. As with joining the 20 Perspectives, my aim was to boost my creativity, have something to work towards, giving me some kind of anchorage in this terrible year 2024, hoping, it would all turn out for the better.

At first, I had said I would most likely not be able to contribute to the group’s upcoming exhibition at BMO ’25, thinking it would prove to be too much stress to whip out a quilt in the short amount of time I would have once we finished our move. Especially as the topic ‘alchemy’ didn’t exactly cause a flood of ideas that asked to be put into a quilt.

When we started unpacking all our boxes in the new apartment, however, the first thing I put on the design wall was a conglomeration of fabrics with a special meaning, because I had come up with an idea after all. Searching the internet for a definition led me, of course, to Wikipedia, and the German page defines the term ‘alchemy’ as „die Lehre von den Eigenschaften der Stoffe und ihren Reaktionen“, i.e. the doctrine of the characteristics of elements/materials and their reactions with each other. (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemie)

The German noun “Stoffe”, however, also means ‘fabrics’, which gave me a short cut for my interpretation. Fabrics have a relationship and some kind of reaction when they are put next to each other, especially when sewn together, and when special fabrics are joined, the alchemy between them takes off. I decided to pair some of my special fabrics that were all waiting to be used: rust dyed fabric pieces I had brought home from my trip to South Africa, an indigo dyed scarf, the kimono from my collage project with Kathleen Loomis. I discovered that the pattern on the indigo dyed scarf, which I liked in its design but didn’t wear much because it felt too narrow, was off-set a bit when folded in half: the patterns don’t exactly match. Which I really like a lot.

 

The rust-dyed pieces came home with me from South Africa, and I love them for their coloring, intensity of pattern, and, of course, because they remind me of the trip to Krueger Park and the quilt festival at Johannesburg.

 

Alchemy, in my understanding for this quilt, is not only restricted to the interaction of chemical elements, but I am extending it to fabrics, when placed next to each other. Putting it all together felt good, and after a bit of turning and changing I liked to layout, too.

First attempt - but it got turned around.

 

However, as I had noticed before in another context, but completely forgotten, the rusted fabrics from South Africa are so tightly woven that they are VERY difficult to sew, which was the reason why I had not used these particular fabrics up yet. Sewing them was hard for the machine, and quilting over them caused multiple thread breakages, disruptions in the quilting process and unpleasant loops on the backside. I was indeed getting to the point where I could have thrown this piece out of the window!

 

Deciding on a quilting design then proved another challenge. Yet when I started reading former chancellor Angela Merkel’s memoir that was published recently, and read the section on her most famous (or infamous) statement throughout the 16 years of her chancellorship, I thought it would be interesting to add another layer of alchemy. The quote is from 2016, when Germany was facing the massive influx of more than one million Syrians fleeing the civil war in their country, and quite a few other refugees from several other countries. Chancellor Merkel said that Germany had faced so many difficult situations and overcome them, and that we would be able to deal with and overcome this challenge as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDQki0MMFh4

Interestingly enough, her full statement was hardly ever quoted, but reduced to the three-word-phrase ‘we will manage’. Events following this massive influx of refugees had and still have quite an alchemic-like effect on German society, which I myself felt vividly while I was trying to accompany refugees through the maze of German administration, rules and regulations, giving them guidance for everyday life in a country that is rather different from their own. For this quilt on alchemy I decided to put as much of the quote onto the quilt surface as would fit, and except for a few last words, most of it is on there.

 

Yes, I hated the quilting because of the difficulties with the densely woven fabric. No, I don’t think it is one of my strongest quilts. But it is giving a platform for some of my favorite fabrics, and it includes a statement for which I still admire our former chancellor. At this particular moment it is still not clear whether we have indeed managed to deal with the crisis, our current political situation is partly due to that refugee crisis (combined with problems going back to German reunification, and probably even further back). And in the end I don’t really hate this quilt. But it made a good title for this post (which I started some time in December and am only now finding time to finish).

 

Addendum: This quilt will be on display together with the other Voyage quilts in the collection "Alchemy" at the Scottish Quilt Show in Glasgow in March and at the Brno Patchwork Meeting in April.

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.

75th Anniversary

 

Photo of the front page article from the daily
newspaper "Die Welt" from May 23, 2024

Last Thursday, May 23^rd, marked the 75th anniversary of Germany’s ‘Grundgesetz’, which translates as ‘Basic Law’ (you can find the English translation here) and is Germany’s constitution. Its name derives from the fact that it was passed by a legislative convention that included members from only three of the then occupied sections of Germany, the American Sector, the British Sector, and the French Sector. Representatives from the Russian Sector were not included as the Cold War was already in its beginning stages, a unified Germany was not in the interest of the Russian occupiers. The convention declared a continued interest in aiming for a unified Germany, therefore this linguistic specification.

The document included paragraphs that left open the option for the other parts of Germany to join the union, two different possibly ways to achieve reunification were outlined, and the Federal Republic of Germany with a clear West-orientation was on its way.

The Russian Sector passed a separate constitution a few months later, leading to a de facto separation of the two German states that would last forty years, until just a few months respectively weeks after the celebrations of the 40^th anniversaries of the two different documents, when dissatisfaction, demonstrations in the Eastern part of Germany and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire led to the opening of borders in November 1989 and political reunification in October 1990.

The Grundgesetz aimed to improve on deficiencies of the constitution of the Weimar Republic, learn from other democratic countries and their experiences and was worded explicitly to make it impossible to have developments such as the destabilisation of democracy as had happened during the Weimar years that then led to the dictatorship of Hitler and his Nazi regime.

We were taught to be proud about the Grundgesetz, and although I have always had an emotional difficulty with calling myself (and being) German because of the historic load that comes with it, I have indeed always been patriotic about the intentions expressed in that document. I must not be the only one with this condition as there exists a special term for this feeling, "Verfassungspatriotismus", i.e. patriotism for the constitution. As a political constitution I think it is really pretty darn good. Even if there are flaws in its execution in some areas, and I do not agree with some of the changes that were made in later years. (A two-thirds majority is needed in both chambers of parliament to enable a change in the wording, and there are a few articles that are not open to attempts at alteration.)

I made a quilt that runs the text of the first (unalterable) article, “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar” (‘Human dignity is untouchable’). 

 

Part of the text messages series: Article 1

It was part of the SAQA Europe-Middle East exhibition “Made in Europe” a few years ago, and on display at FoQ, and it sold recently. So it got out there, and it’s maybe having some impact now.

These words were also one of the driving motivations behind my long and intensive involvement with refugees, which is still ongoing on a smaller level, even though I don’t talk about it much anymore. (I might, once the current bout of uncertainty is over, but only, if it turns into success.)

Likewise, my love and appreciation for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is grounded on these words, as they were drawn in part from that document. UDHR has been influential in several of my quilts, the words appear as the quilting and title of “Everyone has the Right” and “#UDHR” from a few years ago.

My strong feelings about justice, equality and human rights has made it rather difficult to live with a peaceful mind in the last years as more and more wars are erupting in so many different areas of the world, social justice seems to be eroding in developed countries and the countries that developed countries have been exploiting, climate and plastic crisis is increasing and so on and so on. I don’t know how to deal with all of this. And I don’t know whether making a quilt about that will help. So perhaps there won’t be any more ‘political’ quilts of mine? Who knows. I have no clue whether it makes sense to make quilts expressing a political opinion, what do you think?