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...  ;-)