Happy New Year!

I wish that in 2012 there will be many a nice cup, filled wih beautiful experiences, unveiled for you!

Happy Holidays!

His high endeavors are an inward light
That makes the path before him always bright.
~William Wordsworth

http://www.quotegarden.com/light.html

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

But I am sure that I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round... as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely.

http://quotations.about.com/od/specialdays/a/christmas5.htm

Christmas Cards

These are my Christmas cards this year: little handmade quilts with a hand-appliquéd tree-motif on top. The quilts are the size of a postcard, so it's easy to send them with a normal envelope. I decided not to use any templates, so each tree has an invividual form, plus I add one or more stars (embroidered with yellow yarn) and a tree top, which is made of silk yarn ( when I work with silk pieces I collect the threads I cut off).

 I also decided against any glue or other things that are not that typical for quilts, but then again I had to solve the problem where to write Christmas messages ? So I had the idea of simply attaching a little bag to the back of the quilt, and here I can put in a little card or a folded piece of nice paper. So the recipient of such a Christmas card takes the message out of a little quilt bag...I think that sounds ok, doesn't it? 
(I also attach a little loop, just in case anyone wants to hang up this little Christmas quilt.)

St. Nicholas' Day

It's December 6, St. Nicholas' Day, today and that's for me the start to work on my Christmas Quilt again. It's some kind of a ritual which started 2009: from December 6 to January 6 each year I work on a Christmas Quilt. This is my first one and the top is nearly finished, I'm working on the border now. Maybe I am able to finish the quilting work this time....and on Jan 6 I will carefully fold it and store it until the start of the Christmas season in 2012. (The picture from the post below - December 4- was taken last year.)


The best thing is to unwrap the piece on St. Nicholas' Day and see what was done before... so I nearly forgot that I already had started to work on the border last year, I am delighted to see that it looks really good, to me that is! :-) This working on a Christmas quilt - whoever might use this piece later in life - gives me some good feeling I can't describe further, I only know it's much better than rushing back and forth through shopping malls. I feel that I give my time to something that really counts. Baking cookies and such: the same thing! Ahhh, I love this season (just like I love every other season, too!).

Christmas Time

It's Christmas Time Again

(by Bob Lazzar-Atwood)

Put your problems on probation
Run your troubles off the track,
Throw your worries out the window
Get the monkeys off your back.
Silence all your inner critics
With your conscience make amends,
And allow yourself some happiness
It's Christmas time again!

Call a truce with those who bother you
Let all the fighting cease,
Give your differences a breather
And declare a time of peace,
Don't let angry feelings taint
The precious time you have to spend,
And allow yourself some happiness
It's Christmas time again!

Like some cool refreshing water
Or a gentle summer breeze,
Like a fresh bouquet of flowers
Or the smell of autumn leaves,
It's a banquet for the spirit
Filled with family, food and friends,
So allow yourself some happiness
It's Christmas time again!

http://www.theholidayspot.com/christmas/poems/poetry_page_3.htm#tistime

Special

"The heart is forever inexperienced."

Henry David Thoreau

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/heart_4.html

Log Cabin Pattern: in Quilt and in Watercolor

....well, it's some kind of Log Cabin pattern, it's my "variation", the original one has a slightly different arrangement of strips... :-)

"With watercolour, you can't cover up the marks. There's the story of the construction of the picture, and then the picture might tell another story as well."

David Hockney

http://quote.robertgenn.com/getquotes.php?catid=328

Watercolor: Appliquéd Grapes

It's like I am saying the same things, just in a different language.

Watercolor Amish Diamond Quilt

Watercolor Honeycomb Quilt Pattern

Watercolors

my watercolor painting of a quilt...

Mended

... and this is how it looked like when my mother - or my grandmother - used that darning mushroom and mended a sheet. I still have some old sheets and tablecloths from that time and I love to find these small traces of work.

Old Tools

This is a wooden darning mushroom my mother used when I was a kid. Must be at least 50 years old. My sister found it and presented me with it. I love these old tools, how beautiful they are, manufactured with great care (I love the floral engravings) and wearing all the marks of long hours of work (so many little holes from the picking darning needle). Noone does it anymore today, mending socks or clothes... I don't do it either. But I love to be reminded.

Sunshine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR6EAKH6bvw&feature=related

I learned that  because of copyright problems it's not possible all over the world to watch the video I recommended earlier. But this video here is nearly the same one and should work wherever you are. Enjoy! (and maybe cry, I did)  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7PAMgNEtSY&feature=related

Here is what this video is all about:

Chimpanzees are out in the sunshine for the first time in 30 years. They were lab animals, used for medical testing, and they had spent the last 30 years locked in cases. Some of them were born in the labs, some were taken and used for medical testing when they were kids and only remember vaguely now what it was like to feel the sun, to breathe fresh air, to walk on green grass.

Gut Aiderbichl (what a lovely person who made that all possible: Michael Aufhauser) became a refuge for them. Aufhauser built many places of refuge in Germany, Switzerland, Austria for animals who were mistreated, abused, abandoned.

This has nothing to do with quilts (or in some ways it has?), but I felt like mentioning it here.

So True

I love these two quotes.

"It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are."

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (Swiss-American psychiatrist and author)

http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/facade/

and:

"This above all, -- to thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Poetry

How lovely! The Nobel Prize to a POET! I do like his work!!

Tomas Tranströmer, Nobel Prize in Literature 2011 

Romanesque Arches 

            Inside the huge Romanesque church the tourists  jostled in the half darkness.

Vault gaped behind vault, no complete view.

A few candle flames flickered.

An angel with no face embraced me

and whispered through my whole body:

“Don’t be ashamed of being human, be proud!

Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.

You will never be complete, that’s how it’s meant to be.”

Blind with tears

I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza

together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Mr. Tanaka, and Signora Sabatini,

and inside each of them vault opened behind vault endlessly.

http://www.cprw.com/Coyle/transtromer.htm

           

"One More Thing"

Steve Jobs. 
He said in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address:

"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Quasicrystals

http://www.n-tv.de/wissen/Was-sind-Quasikristalle-article4461571.html

Isn't it incredibly beautiful how it all fits here?

Dan Shechtman received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of quasicrystals. 

I watched him on TV talking to journalists and this is the advice he had for scientists: 
"Be open."

Me

Someone asked me to post more pictures of myself here... so, well, here is one...just a snapshot...  ;-)

Autumn Quilt

I finished this quilt today. I used a simple, oldfashioned, more or less haphazard way to assemble the pieces for the top. (patchwork and quilting: all handmade) 
I used all kinds of fabrics, many scraps tell me stories about friends, family, travels... some of the fabric pieces are very old, they were parts of a tablecloth used by my grandparents. Some buttons, which I attached to hold all layers firmly together - in addition to some rough quilting stitches - , originally belonged to old bedlinen which was used in my family when I was a kid. The quilt is stuffed with warm materials, so it's fine for the cooler days and nights to come!

Books

All the important things I ever needed to learn, I always learned them not at school, and not at home, I learned them by reading books. And somehow the right books always came to me, miraculously. And it is still like that. 
I like this quote:
"A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul."  - Franz Kafka
 http://www. quotegarden.com/books.html

Münster

Münster (Germany) was once declared "the most liveable city worldwide"! 
See: http://www.muenster.de/stadt/livcom/index218.htm
Well, it is certainly one of the most beautiful cities one can imagine, I have been there yesterday afternoon, and I absolutely loved it.


Here are some snapshots:

And this is a scene with one of my mice...Apparently she feels quite homey! :-)

Flowers, and a Heart

I once received the book "American Impressionism" as a gift. I love this book so much! (by Richard J. Boyle, 1974)  This painting is shown in this book, it's by John La Farge (I love him!) and is called: "Flowers on a Window Ledge", painted circa 1862.

The flowers are so beautiful, but I also like the small path leading through a garden to the house, and the light. The light is so lovely, so bright.

The path is following a line which may be seen as one half of a heart!

So here is a whole one, a whole heart. :-)

The Patchwork Girl of Oz, by L. Frank Baum (1913)

There will come the day when I will own this lovely book! 


These are quotations from the first chapters:


"Horrid?" she replied. "Why, I'm thoroughly delightful. I'm an Original, if you please, and therefore incomparable. Of all the comic, absurd, rare and amusing creatures the world contains, I must be the supreme freak. Who but poor Margolotte could have managed to invent such an unreasonable being as I? But I'm glad--I'm awfully glad!--that I'm just what I am, and nothing else."

There was only one path before them, at the beginning, so they could not miss their way, and for a time they walked through the thick forest in silent thought, each one impressed with the importance of the adventure they had undertaken.

Suddenly the Patchwork Girl laughed. It was funny to see her laugh, because her cheeks wrinkled up, her nose tipped, her silver button eyes twinkled and her mouth curled at the corners in a comical way.

"Has something pleased you?" asked Ojo, who was feeling solemn and joyless through thinking upon his uncle's sad fate.

"Yes," she answered. "Your world pleases me, for it's a queer world, and life in it is queerer still. Here am I, made from an old bedquilt and intended to be a slave to Margolotte, rendered free as air by an accident that none of you could foresee. I am enjoying life and seeing the world, while the woman who made me is standing helpless as a block of wood. If that isn't funny enough to laugh at, I don't know what is."

Cat and Mice

well, as long as she has her quilt for herself, my cat is ok with all the mice on the right hand side here... 
:-)

More Reliefs

Meanwhile I have finished some more reliefs (more about my reliefs: see also August 21, 2011) It's interesting to me that I lost all hesitation in using black, I usually had been very very careful in the past to avoid black parts in my work, but here now the entire effect is based on the contrast to white. The black (or white) lines are about 1 cm deep. 

In addition I use red and yellow. No other colors.
These reliefs can be hung up easily (2,5 cm thick, the back being hollow), they weigh next to nothing. 

The patterns are typical patchwork patterns: the Diamond, Orange Peel, Bright Hopes, Multiple Borders. My Bright Hopes relief  (third one from above, "in combination") has an inner diamond which is cut out, so the color and the shade of the inner diamond depends on the surroundings and background where it hangs and on the time of day.

In combination:

Although I did not intend this similarity in the first place, I realize that my reliefs do have some kind of connection to African American quilts. I like that! I did not know that I could do this.

(quilt picture above taken from: http://museumshows.org/shows/GeesBend.html)

Bravely Making "Music"

' "Quarrelsome? Certainly - and not with men alone but gods. Tangled in misery? More than most men. But despairing? No. Defeated by the certainty of death? Never defeated. Frightened of the dreadful wood? Not frightened either. A rebellious, brave, magnificent far-wandering old man who made his finest music out of manhood and met the Furies on their own dark ground."

- Archibald MacLeish speaking at the Presidential Convocation and Ground Breaking for the Robert Frost Library at Amherst on October 26, 1963'

I like this portrait of Robert Frost.

This quote is from the magnificent book: Robert Frost, A Pictorial Chronicle, by Kathleen Morrison, 1974.

"In three words I can sum up everything I have learned about life: it goes on."

Robert Frost 

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7715.Robert_Frost

Kaleidoscope

A dear friend gave me this link. It is incredibly beautiful. Move your cursor slowly and see what happens...!

http://inoyan.narod.ru/kaleidoskop.swf

Relief

I started to do something entirely new: I now make three-dimensional reliefs with patchwork patterns (this here is a typical Amish Diamond), 18 cm + 18 cm. It's done with papiermaché and it takes five days to finish a relief. Since I never before worked with these strong contrasts I'm a bit surprised to see its stunning effect when such a piece hangs on the wall.
I think I'll make more of them to find out more about three-dimensional patterns and the effect of using white and black and only one more color in them.
I got the idea when I saw such reliefs, made of manure, which a friend of mine had brought home from a trip to Africa. Since I've never been to Africa I can't do African patterns, but I can try to use "my" patchwork patterns and transform them into such reliefs. I'll try that out! :-)