October

This is the block I added to my 2014-quilt this month.

This October everything went "around and around" for me, not like riding a carousel, but like following a natural route, one step leading to another, the ways sometimes being narrow, sometimes wide, offering some exciting new insights...

so now this kind of spiral seemed to be the right motif for my quilt in red and light colors, which serves as some kind of diary for me. Two more months to go, and then I will have finished the top and can start to add the batting and the backing, quilt the three layers, sew a border around it, and I am looking forward to finally being able to hang it up.

This is what I have so far:

Source of Information

Whatever you want to know about quilts, 

here are pictures, examples, descriptions, essays, wonderful collections...

What an excellent source of inspiration and information:

http://www.quiltindex.org/index.php

I go there often, and for smartphones there is a gorgeous App, 

which also welcomes you daily with a lovely "Quilt of the Day"!

A Vase

There is a wonderful poem, "A Vase", by Brad Leithauser,

here:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/245118

Finding the Keys

Finding the Keys

The set seed and the first bulbs showing.

The silence that brings the deer.

The trees are full of handles and hinges;

you can make out keyholes, latches in the leaves.

Buds tick and crack in the sun, break open

slowly in a spur of green.

*

The small-change colours of the river bed:

these stones of copper, silver, gold

.

The rock-rose in the waste-ground

finding some way to bloom. The long

spill of birdsong. Flowers, all

turned to face the hot sky. Nothing stirs.

*

That woody clack of antlers.

In yellow and red, the many griefs of autumn.

The dawn light through amber leaves

and the trees are lanterned, blown

the next day to empty stars.

Smoke in the air; the air, turning.

*

Under a sky of stone and pink

faring in from the north and promising snow:

the blackbird.

In his beak, a victory of worms.

The winged seed of the maple,

the lost keys under the ash.

- by Robin Robertson

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/28/poem-of-the-week-robin-robertson

September

This is my block for September. 

I am working on a wallhanging-quilt which is done with cotton and linen fabrics 

in red and bright colors only and which shows a self-designed block for every month of the year 2014. 

It became some sort of diary for me.

These patterns come quite naturally to me each month, I don't think about them very much, they just "happen". 

Obviously I just wanted to include something calm and peaceful this month, 

and so I did.

This is what I have so far:

Bird Tags

"Birds feed; then they nest. Paint them any color you want, send them halfway around the world, but they'll always find a way back. And eventually they'll show their true colors again."

Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium 

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/birds?page=3

These are mini-quilts, I put them on greeting cards, 

sew them upon small bags, 

or I use them as tags to go with presents.

Pattern

In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world only to the extent that is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.

Christopher Alexander

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/pattern_2.html#zyCmdelO3vJid7cr.99

August

... it's my block for August.

I try to design a square each month in 2014. It's some kind of a diary.

All blocks together will form the top for a 2014-quilt-wallhanging.

I hope to get it all assembled and quilted by the end of December!

That's what I have so far:

Quilt of Belonging

http://www.quiltviews.com/at-grand-rapids-the-quilt-of-belonging

I just received this hint from a friend who is actually in Grand Rapids and is happily enjoying the fabulous view:

The Quilt of Belonging,

showing quilt blocks from 263 cultures represented within Canada and from countries all over the world, all united in one big quilt which is 120 feet long.

It's on display in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA.

Here is a block from Greece:

Here is a lovely video about "The Quilt of Belonging":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4di1ftfa28

and here is more information:

http://www.quiltofbelonging.ca/home.htm

(the pictures of the block from Greece and of the joyful boy I found on the homepage, http://www.quiltofbelonging.ca)

Flowers in a Border

"Earth laughs in flowers."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

I wonder whether I should use such a strip (I designed it in a way that it's all patchwork, no appliqué, I just prefer patchwork-techniques in my work, mostly ) as a run-around-border for my quilt-top with Ginkgo leaves which form a circle...

I think, I will just make more flowers and decide it then.

The flowers could add a light note to the symmetry of the Gingko-circles...?

It would look like this:

Quilts in Movies: Cloud Atlas

I so much love to find beautiful quilts in movies I like - as I found them in "You've Got Mail" or in "The Descendants", "The Human Stain" or in "When Harry Met Sally"  or in "Lincoln" (I showed some pictures here before)...
and now I watched "Cloud Atlas" for the second time and only now did I realize that there is this wonderful "windmill"-quilt in Luisa Rey's room (Halle Berry). Only now did I notice so many more important details in this extraordinary movie - never saw anything like this, and never read any such novel like "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell. It's such an adventure: to read this book, to see this movie.
And this quilt looks so good in her room! A quilt always tells something important about the person who owns (and sometimes made) it.

I found this picture here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/apotospitomou/9268079358/

Unruly

Well, these are some old things, and then there are... what exactly are these?
It's not so easy to answer that question.
No1: These things make people smile very often, so that's what they are for in the first place.
No2: As always, things are what people think they are.
Me, I think these "Unruly Flowers", as I call them, could be used as bookmarks. That's what I do. 

(the book shown here is a masterpiece: it's "In And Out Of The Garden" by Sara Midda, 1984)

Here these "Unruly Flowers" come with stems and they are attached to wooden clothes pins:

I like this "unruliness" in them, they seem to say:

"I am what I am, and what I am needs no excuses",

that's a Gloria- Gaynor-song... :-)

Revisited

... just some blocks in quilts I made a longer time ago, I always have them around me but now that I make fresh lists of my work I "revisit" some things and look at them as if they were new guests in my home...

Rediscovered

Just something I rediscovered when I took inventory in my studio: 

squares I made for small quilts a longer time ago. Now I like them even better than at the time I worked on them. 

That's the case these days quite often:

 I dust off a quilt or a cushion or a mouse or a teddy bear or whatnot and I think: 

Oh, I'm so glad I made it!!

2014-Quilt: July

July was such a busy month for me, with trips to several places, I went this way and that way, turned to here and there, sometimes things worked out as planned, sometimes not, there were pleasant and unpleasant surprises- 

so this became my patchwork-block for July: uneven lines and forms, no ruler was used, but somehow it all added up to: 

a square of 24 x 24 cm (9,45" x 9,45"),

the way I wanted things to be. 

And as such I added it as my 7th block to my 2014-quilt, 

which shows one block for every month of this year.

Hearts at the Garden Café "Thee en zo"

I wished I had sewn these hearts by myself, I so much like them.

I found them at a very wonderful garden café near Winterswijk (Netherlands),

it's called "Thee en zo".

The café is located next to a fabulous farm house (which is a B&B as well), it is richly decorated with wonderful flowers, there are lots of lovely places to sit near wooden houses or near a small river under old trees, hens and their young ones are picking and walking around... What I especially love is that it is all based on trust: you are completely on your own, it's all self-service, delicious cakes and beverages are offered in a lovely designed wooden house and there is a small shop as well. You then find a price list and a wooden cash box, in which you put your money 

(and find change also).

No wonder that I didn't meet a guest who wasn't smiling!

The picture of the "Welcome"-sign on the right hand side here was taken at 

"Thee en zo" as well.

Simone Kok, Brinkeweg 31, Winterswijk-Miste

http://www.tuintjetheeenzo.nl

(more pictures on my Flugblatt-site with poems and such:

http://flugblatt.blogspot.de,

posted today also, July 18, 2014)

"An experienced Teddy Bear brings with him a lifetime of knowledge and experience; the wisdom of silence and the stillness in moments of great turmoil. The long-suffering patience that is learned when belonging to a child who is coming of age, and coping with the bewilderment that this period of time can bring, is what he does best. The experienced bear has seen life through the heart and eyes of a child grown to adulthood and perhaps even accompanied that adult all the way to the end of the road." 

-Ted Menton 

http://www.iloveteddies.com/documents/document_887.php

Teddy Bears

"I miss the days when all it took to make me feel better was my teddy bear."

(Unknown) 

http://www.searchquotes.com/search/Teddy_Bear

Oh, with me, these days are not gone,

simply making these teddies already made me feel very good...

there's some magic about teddy bears, I think.

These are small ones (20 cm, 8"),

sewn by hand,

all cotton, and they are stuffed with fabric scraps.

In the Making

Ginkgos

These are leaves from the Ginkgo trees in Weimar and Jena (Germany), they belong to the eldest Ginkgo trees in Europe. They are more than 200 years old, both were planted by our beloved German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

I tried to use Ginkgo leaves as a motif for my block with five leaves forming a circle, thereby giving space for five petals in the middle in another color, all having their origin in the five-sided form in the center.

Since I had been thinking of Ginkgos this way for a longer time now, I was very glad to find these lovely trees: in Weimar opposite the Amalia Library, or here in Jena in the very lovely Botanical Gardens: