Nature Award Nominee?

The other day I awoke after a hot and rather restless night with just a memory of a snippet of a dream hovering in my mind. I had been told that “o(round)moon” had been nominated for the Nature Award. 

 

No clue who was giving this award, where this would have happened – nor did I find out whether anything came of the nomination in the end. Of course, this lingered, because I don’t frequently remember my dreams.

The quilt was made for SAQA’s exhibition “text messages” several years ago, traveled with that exhibition for three years and is, I have to admit, one of my all-time favorite makes. It has been quite a while since I made it (2013!), and it must have been on my mind because of a new project I have started with Barbara Lange, 

 

which in turn made me remember the important role this particular quilt plays in the conception of my series “text messages”. 

When making it, I realized that several quilts that had gone before also had a topic of text messages. This one, although it was the first one to actually receive the title “text messages” was no. 8 in a whole “new” series!

I am currently also turning ideas in my head about the piece for the next 20 Perspectives’ challenge, which has the broadly stated topic ‘nature’. 

 

Quite possible that’s how the whole combination came about. I will include o(rounD)moon in the exhibition I have here in my town in October. And quite possibly the Nature-inspired one as well.

Paying dearly.

 The past few days I have spent a lot of time on our terrace, either resting (sometimes reading) in the hammock, or sitting in the shade of the magnolia tree, spinning along with the Tour de Fleece/France. I look like I have been on holiday and not like I have been recuperating. I actually did get quite a bit of spinning done, it's not even the second day of rest on the tour 

 

Sometimes I have the live reporting on the tablet on,
but most of the time I don't bother as I am not really
interested in the biking event. I just like the spinning event.

and I have spun far more than half of the whole batch of fibers I started out with, and at that point I wasn't expecting to get much done. My goal when I set out was 'spin a little bit every day'.

The cough is slowly getting easier, but thanks to my kind of job I had the 'pleasure' of being subjected to a second pcr test, after five days of quarantine, which was still positive. So I get to stay home a few more days. What a perfect way to start a new job! My boss is going to love it....

Personally, I think it is completely right to be tested again, but current German regulations are different for 'just anybody' and for people working in health care jobs, and that really upsets me. There must be many more people out there who are still positive after 5 days of quarantine, and they just get to leave the house, return to their normal life - thus endangering everybody whom they meet on the street, because mask wearing is not mandatory anymore either. Health care workers, however, get tested a second time, have to stay home longer - and when back at their job, they face the danger that all the other people are posing form them while doing their job. I don't think this is fair. And it certainly can't be what health experts would recommend. But... I wasn't involved in any of these decisions. I know I would not be good out there working all day in my current state, but I feel so much better that I can take the active decision to enjoy these unfairly allotted free days. Of course, there is still more spinning waiting for me, but it won't be the only fiber activity I will turn to.

Spinning a fiber sample pack from Ashford, using all the
colors that are still in the box according to a pre-determined
time scheme, two threads will be from this pack, a third
thread to neutralize will be gray with some silk carded
in to soften the original merino. In the end I will have A LOT of
this yarn...

 

As a little treat to myself, at the beginning of my quarantine I gave in to a craving I had felt for a little while. On Instagram I follow @visible_creative_mending, and for a while I had been considering getting her book on techniques of meding. Of course, I know how to mend, dating back to my grandmother's teaching and my mother's book of handicrafts from way back then (the first edition came out in 1930, although my mother's copy is from 1954 - perhaps it would be an interesting topic for a research paper how that book changed during its lifespan from the beginning through the years of Nazi-regime in Germany, and how it was used to influence girls' lives... but that is just a thought on the side, and I would rather just make and stitch instead of following up on it).

 

I also have Rodabaugh's book which I bookreviewed for the Guild's magazine a few years ago. 

 

And I have been showing some of the mends I do, so this was a mere fancy to treat myself during illness. As a matter of fact, I had been through the first steps of ordering in the online shop, up to the moment when shipping costs came up and I was confronted with another of those unpleasant side effects of Brexit. For one thing, a price of £28,00 is, I think, quite costly for a book like this. But add to that another £ 11 for shipping... at first, I balked at that and was sensible and told myself 'that is quite a lot of money for something you basically know how to do', and refrained. But, with illness messing up my thinking I did go ahead and order it.

 

Yesterday it arrived. Not only is it small-ish, definitely small for a price like that, but German post has once again given me the pleasure of 'treating it through customs' (worth €3.45), and for the 'lending' of this the postal service adds a service fee of €6,37 or something like that. So I had to pay an almost extra €10 to even lay hand on this... I do call that paying dearly for a lack of resistance to temptation. 

It looks like a nice enough book, but definitely not worth that much. Hopefully I will be more careful before ever ordering anything again that will arrive from outside EU borders.

Succumbed.

 

After two and a half years of ever prolonged lockdown periods, wearing face masks either all over the place, but definitely at work all the time, three shots of vaccination, being prudent and careful, months on end of social distancing and lack of contacts, a deeply felt lack of cultural input because so much wasn’t possible, recently offending people by single-handedly (excuse the pun) trying to change the unhygienic habit of hand-shakes as a greeting the virus has caught up with me. I sort of was expecting to catch it at some point sooner or later, and I am relieved that it happened now, and not a day before we are planning to go on vacation in August. But...

Not sure whether I got it from that colleague whom I hugged (without a mask) when saying good-bye at the OR (but the scratchy throat started that evening right away and she was reported sick only a few days later, so perhaps she caught it from me?) The unfortunate part of it all is that I had only four days at the new job before I was tested positive, which, of course, is not exactly what an employer wants from a new employee. But what’s there to do in a pandemic?

The test result had come in on Saturday, and the weekend was terrible, because I did not have any medication to deal with the coughing. That has changed, and at least I am not coughing my guts out anymore. Weakly lying in the hammock for long stretches of time, 

 

but every once in a while I gather enough strength to spin along with the #tourdefleece2022. 

Sometimes I spin along as they ride, although, to be honest,
my interest in the tour as such is minor.

 I am spinning a fine thread, so the project will take a while, but I have spun almost 50% of the sample pack I started out with. In the end, I will need a thrid thread, though, to make it a good 3-ply, I will be working on this longer than the tour, even though I plan to spin along until the end of the month, including the Tour des Femmes as well.

That’s not too exhausting. Thinking hasn’t been possible, but perhaps the next few days will show a bit of improvement.

I watch my flock of chickens, 

This is 2/5ths of the flock.

 

look up at the leaves of the magnolia 

 

and wait for the world, and my cough, to improve.

Towards an exhibition

 

text messages: Vilhelm Lundström,
made in response to a challenge for the group 12 by the Dozen,
2018, 40 x 40 cm

Today I took a (sort of) inventory of my quilts. I have an exhibition coming up in October, in our local museum. This is not an art museum, it has a standard exhibition that concentrates on local history of pottery as it was common here in the 18^th to early 20th centuries. The museum has won prizes and is famous amongst pottery circles, the early 20^th century e.g. was a time when migrant workers came here from northern Italy. Special exhibitions are shown regularly, though, and recently there have been exhibitions about the times of World War II, or the history of water in the city. The new director (who is the first director with an academic background and not doing this as a volunteer and has been here for a couple of years by now) is trying to diversify in terms of topics that will be dealt with. Currently they are showing a recollection of the 40 years of the city’s professional women’s volleyball team which has been playing in the first national league for several years.

Greening Rothko, 2016, 45 x 80 cm,
made as contribution to one of the challenges for
International Threads

 

I was offered to do this exhibition in the context of the attempt at diversification of topics, and as 2017 recipient of the Kulturpreis (Cultural Prize) of the city. Indeed, during my nursing course I had at some point thought I would not ever again try to do a solo show, I felt so drained artistically, and there wasn’t much time to spend on planning, designing, executing (enough) quilts that satisfied my personal standards regarding artistic merit. But the museum is not too big, so when the director and the city’s cultural manager approached me with this idea, I agreed to this adventure. I figured it might perhaps be another incentive to spark my creative impulses.

Mapping my inner world,
2018,58 x 105 cm

 

Hanging in the museum is going to be a bit tricky because the display cases are glass-fronted cases with some unusual shapes and widths. Although the city is having a few display walls made, I will mostly need to refer back to smaller sizes, and I really had no clue as to how many smaller quilts I have in stock. It was an interesting dive into my history of quilt making, and a rediscovery of some I had more or less forgotten. That happens when the website is unsufficiently maintained (and it has been disfunctional for a while now anyway, that’s another thing I need to get fixed before the exhibitions is actually on). Most (or at least many) of them have never been exhibited because they were made as group challenge quilts. Some of them I was surprised to see with a temporal distance and realize that they werent’t bad at all.

 

Challenge 3, 2014, 40 x 80 cm,
made for a challenge of International Threads

I concocted a list of what I have, measured some (or most) of them and was relieved that I should be able to fill the space of the museum with smaller quilts, but the actual matching of the widths with the plans of display cases still remains to be done. I also have to clarify with the cultural manager how many display walls there are indeed going to be so I would be able to hang a few larger or at least not really small quilts as well.

The piece which is currently traveling with the SAQA-exhibition “Forced to Flee” is bound to return home at some point in the fall, as the Festival of Quilts is supposed to be the last place where the exhibition will be shown, at least that is the current state of affairs. The picture currently shown at the top of the blog is a detail from that piece. That is one of the bigger quilts that I really would like to show. But, ironically, after FoQ the show will go back to the States before the individual quilts are being sent back to their owners, and that turnover may take longer than the opening date for my exhibition. We will see. The inventory session at least has given me the secure feeling that I will be able to hang enough quilts, even if it may not be an entirely coherent show.