SAQA's Aurifil Signature Thread Collection

All the ongoing things and pressure before I left for teaching a workshop at the Nadelwelt in Karlsruhe and subsequently premiering as a vendor at a larger patchwork event in Einbeck had slowed down many of my internet activities in the first part of the month – I hadn’t really been keeping up with reading newsletters and stuff. But thanks to Kathy Loomis’ first post on the SAQAAurifil Signature Thread Collection I was alerted to this poll while it was still ongoing and voted for my favorite selection sometime during the week before I left.

These were the three options you had:

set A

set B

set C

When I had completed my click (on C) I immediately found out that I had voted for what was until then the majority’s choice, so in a way I was told that, amongst those who had already voted until then, my taste is nothing out of the ordinary. Of course my decision was based on a much less sophisticated reasoning than Kathy’s line of argument in her second post on the topic,which appeared about two days after I cast my vote. I really only chose according to “which of these combinations would I want to have in my supplies?”

When I look at the beauty of palette of the entire Aurifil color card and my own favorites on it I think my very personal Signature Selection might have been a different one than the ones SAQA chose to include in their three different choices. But we werent' asked to pick our personal signature collection in this case.

Aurifil's color card - I just fell in love
with the range of beautiful colors when I first saw this card.

Aurifil has been one of my favorite threads for quite a while – which is one reason why I was so upset when I started having the breakage problems while trying to practise my machine quilting around/after Christmas. Aurifil, however, is not easy to get in Germany, so I stack up whenever I happen to be at a major event where you can find it. I do have lots of colors, though far from all of them!

The other brand of thread that I bought in search of the thread that wouldn’t break during my machine troubles is King Tut. These also come in a nice color scheme, and the thread has a very pleasant feel to it. 

I admit that I am not too thrilled with the length of color changes in their variegated colors, which follow too quickly for my taste, especially in the ones that have more contrast. But I do like their color palette, too. My plan right now is to pick out whichever color is needed from my supplies, regardless of the brand. I need to really find out how the new machine takes to them anyway.

Oh - and by now the result of the SAQA-signature election has been published, and I found out that I voted for what became the final winner. Given that I will take up the post as second co-representative for the Europe/Middle East region of SAQA on the first of August, I am quite pleased to see that my taste is in accordance with the majority of voters with regard to the threads that were chosen to represent the organization.

Colour of the month

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

Little escap(ad)e: Fagus Factory in Alfeld

Between last weekend, which I spent teaching a workshop at the “Nadelwelt” (World of Needles) in Karlsruhe, and the beginning of the four-day-event by the German Patchwork-Guild in Einbeck, where I will be selling my hand-dyed fabrics, I had two days off. My husband had suggested that I should rather save several hundred miles of driving and go north directly instead of going home Sunday night only to leave again early Wednesday morning. So I took a room in a modest guest house in Alfeld, north of Einbeck, in an area that every German child has heard about if it has been listening to Grimms’ fairy tales: it is the area of the “Seven mountains” where the Grimms located the story of Snow White and the seven dwarfs, and which is mentioned in the story when the stepmother asks the mirror about how beautiful she is.

I went there on purpose, because I knew that I would have a wonderful opportunity to educate myself: Alfeld is the city where Walter Gropius, architect and founder of the Bauhaus school, got his first chance at realizing a major building. 

Sketch for Fagus factory in Alfeld

The industrial site of the Fagus factory, begun in 1911, has been beautifully restored and was awarded the title of Unesco World Cultural Heritage Site last year, which I learned from Mary during our Bauhaus-workshop in November. 

Fagus building today

Originally Fagus works was a production plant for shoe lasts, over the years other areas of business have been added. 

Shoe last from about 1915

The site is still a working production site, but the very first original buildings have now been turned into a permanent exhibit on Walter Gropius and Carl Benscheidt, the founder of the Fagus factory 

who accepted Gropius’ letter of application and was an essential part in the beginning and building of Gropius’ career. Further parts of the exhibit are a documentation of the renovation process, the development and history of shoe making and shoe lasts, a section on forests and their importance for the world climate, current-day tehcnical use of massive wood in building and industry, derived timber products, the people who work at Fagus, and the history of the firm and its position in the overall network of Unesco World Heritage sites. They also have changing special exhibits in the basement:

Special exhibit in the basement

The entire exhibit is very informative and well worth spending the larger part of the morning on. Each section is located on a separate floor of the building, which used to be the storage and drying location for the beech wood needed as raw material for the lasts.

Between the various floors you pass through the restored stairway, and the overall architecture already gives an impression of what was later to be called the “Bauhaus style”.

In the section on forests you get to see one complete cubic metre of wood – and you learn that it takes between two and five seconds for this amount of wood to grow back (measured over the entire size of Germany), and you need between five and ten cubic metres of wood for the construction of the wooden beams that carry a large roof.

On the premises is also a little café where you can get a warm meal if you happen to finish your visit around twelve o’clock – which is when the Fagus workers come to fetch their lunch. I happened to be sitting next to two nice researchers from New Zealand and had a nice chat with them while waiting for the rain to stop that had started while I was in the exhibit. Which didn’t happen, though, so I now have a new umbrella.

There is also one little building facing the railroad tracks that hasn’t been restored yet. I think they should restore this one as well and put the bookstore or souvenir shop in there:

If you’re planning on coming to Germany for a visit any time soon, and happen to be more in the northern part of the country, and are interested in Bauhaus history, this place is definitely a “must see”!

Inspirational Pictures

More light art that crossed my way.

27, 28, 29. Plus 1.

Only four months left until the opening of my show at the Patchwork Festival in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines in September. And less than one month to go until the deadline when I have to hand in a list with all the names and sizes of the quilts I want to show there. Having organized workshops and conferences myself before I can very well understand that the people organizing it all want to have plenty of time to print out the labels, they don’t want to be doing that during the last three days before the opening. From the other side, I consider this date much too early, after all, I don’t plan to stop working three months before the show. Yet they want to have my newest quilts!

Add to that the fact that our family is going on a two-week-vacation after Whitsun, i.e. the two weeks right before the deadline. We’re traveling by train, so I won’t be taking a sewing machine (I also think my husband would not really like that idea after all the preparations that have been going on, we all need a break.) So that list needs to be ready and sent off before our departure.

My word-file which I started several months ago to keep my head afloat has proven a very helpful device. Whenenver I started a new top, I would enter that in the file, with a working title, and as soon as it was finished, I would also enter the expected finished size plus the distance between the quilts when hung. Every once in a while I would add up the total.

There were times when I was well above 30m – and I only needed to fill 29. At that stage, however, there were three quilts still in the list which I really wanted to take out of the show in Alsace. Partly because they neither fit in with the ‚single’ quilts which do not belong in one of the two series I will be showing, nor do they fit in with the themes of the two series. Partly also because I do not consider these my strongest quilts, and I would have preferred to be able to fill the space without them. However, having surpassed that magic line of 30 m was an important step for my, psychologically: I knew I could fill all the walls I had been allotted, even if I wanted to reach higher standards for some of the quilts. That was one reason why I could stay almost relaxed during the times of sewing machine troubles and when I was waiting for the new machine. If I hadn’t had passed that 30-m-line by then I probably would have freaked out completely then.

On the first day after the arrival of the new machine, however, I had to abort one top which I had been counting on for sure. I still like the design very much, but at this stage I need a lot more practice with a certain technique before I will be able to sew this one nicely. I am putting those practice sessions off until after the show, though. Nothing to do with the new machine! It will just have to wait for more relaxed times.

That set me calculating again, though – how far was I really beyond the magic line, how many more meters did I want to replace with new work? By then it was clear that I would have to settle for exactly the list I had concocted at that point, or include one or two quilts which weren’t finished, perhaps not even started when the list left my desk. So I spent a whole Sunday drawing a new design for Play of Lines XXXI, and a few sketches for Shapes 6, aiming to add up to another two to two-and-a-half meters.

Design for Play of Lines XXXI...

... which originated from this drawing by my son.

And what about „Plus 1“ that is mentioned in the heading? That refers to a quilt according to the rules of this year’s competition, with the topic „Yesterday Today Tomorrow“. All jury members have been asked to make their quilt on that topic, and they will join the traveling show. This had been started last year for the first time, so I knew that this request would be coming. I had started sketching ideas for this a while ago, and I know the title. I will use a hand-woven fabric which was produced by one of my ancestors and has been handed down in the family, now arriving in my possession.

But I haven’t started sewing it. That will have to wait until all the others are done.

Colour of the month

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Waiting is over, finally.

It should have happened Thursday. At least that was the original day set up for my tutorial on my new Bernina 820. On short notice (Thursday morning) that got pushed back another day, and it all happened on Friday afternoon. Luckily my husband was able to push around all his appointments, make time to take care of my son when he returned home from school, so I could take off.

The Bernina expert, Frau Popp, had come to my dealer to make all the arrangements for him to be re-listed as official Bernina-dealer, and I got my personal introduction to the machine from her. Very nicely she ‘took me by the hand’ and virtually walked me through every single step and possibility that the machine offers. The whole event took over two hours, and in the end I thought I had it all down safely.

Of course that wasn’t quite true as I found out today when I unpacked and tried my hand at it on my own. It is a sewing computer, and computers do take getting used to at first.

Unpacking...

Now how did you have to thread that bobbin which comes without a bobbin case? Which icon on the touchscreen is for what? Wasn’t there a feature where you could do this magnificent thing...? I practised threading the top thread – closely watched by my 7-year-old son who kept giving wise comments and nagging me when could he try it out by himself – and tried out quite a number of the fancy stitches that come along with this edition, although it does not have the embroidery feature that the 830 has.

Only a small selection of the many fancy stitches.

But the best of it all is the BSR-foot. BSR stands for Bernina Stitch Regulator, and is a wonderful little item that regulates the stitch length of your quilting stitches because an integrated sensor (with an extra connection to the computer part) detects the speed of movement of the fabric and adapts the speed of stitching accordingly. And it seems to work quite nicely – these are stitches of an absolute beginner on the machine, executed this afternoon:

We still need to get to know each other better, but I am very positive that this is going to turn into a good relationship!