New Challenge

I know I am way over due announcing my theme for the next challenge. Life seems to be getting in the way lately. And that is also the inspiration for my theme:

Hand stitched

Lately, I have started to sew by hand - simply because I spend so much time sitting at the computer that I do not really enjoy sitting at the sewing machine as much as I used to. In my small world, hand sewing offers a greater potential to relax and take it easy, and it gives me a greater freedom to piece complicated patterns. That is why I would love to see your interpretation of the theme. Now before you groan or kill me: it does not have to be completely hand stitched. I'll be perfectly happy to settle with ONE visible had stitch on the piece, if that is what you are going for.

Happy Holidays and happy stitching!

Barbara

Opening in Munich, at Quilt und Textilkunst Galerie

Friday evening we had the opening of our exhibition in Munich. A select crowd of interested people came, and we were very happy to get a chance to talk to most of them.

Christine Köhne, owner of the gallery, during her opening words

Barbara and Uta, as Uta is giving a short introduction of the group

part of the crowd, listening

Everybody agreed that it is indeed a very nice exhibition. We are showing 58 quilts in total. In one section, a small retrospective of Ita's work is assembled together, with a few more of her quilts throughout the gallery as well.

Here is a walk through the entire gallery, starting upstairs, in the section that features the challenge "Blue".

Blue

"Blue" merging into the "Gray with dash of color" -
we are moving from right to left!

"Gray with a dash of color" - and on the left side you can see upcoming "Red"

"Red"

more "Red", with two new "Signs and Symbols" on the left

A "Sgins and Symbols" in a function of transitioning between "Red" and "Green"

"Green"

"Green" moving into "Autumn Colors"

"Autumn Colors", and a larger "Signs and Symbols" on the left

Four slightly larger pieces, in a very difficult-to-hang-them-up spot above a staircase

Uta Lenk, Barbara Lange, in front of their 'Blue" Quilts

The exhibition is open until December 3, Monday through Friday from 10  to 6, and Saturdays 10 to 4.
We hope that many of you will go and take a look!

Hanging the exhibition in Munich

Barbara Lange and I met on the train and had a busy afternoon putting up the exhibition in Munich, at Quilt et Textilkunst Gallery, Sebastiansplatz.
Public transport makes a lot of things possible - this time the exhibition was pushed around on a wheelbarrow, in two sturdy boxes.

Good to know where the escalators go up when you're coming from the subway station!
We had to change all the hanging arrangements, and worked hard.

And yes, you may very well wonder how we managed to get these four up there. Sorry, now photo of that process, because both of us were seriously involved...

A few first impressions, but the real thing will only be seen tomorrow, when we have the opening.

Here is the invitation/announcement:

Everybody is welcome!

Just in time: Girl Power finished

Just in time for the exhibition in Munich I managed to finish my quilt for the challenge "Signs and Symbols".

It is based on the traffic light symbols going back to times when there was still an East German little man on them that looked much happier and more springy than the stiff and boring West German one. Sometime after the wall came down, a little Girl appeared, too - I admit, I have not gone into the history of the development of this little sign.
Photos can be found on the internet.

Save, print, trace. Somehow I ended up using only the one where she is walking. But wanted to keep the green/red opposition anyway. Transfer to wonderunder, get ready to fuse.

I chose a gray background, in 9 patch, and sprinkled the ladies onto that.

Like this, or perhaps just a little bit different? In the end, the girls in the lower part were moved around a bit. The title is Chrisse Seager's suggestion.

Girl Power

First to be seen in Munich, starting tomorrow.

Autumn colors -- Kathy

I am embarrassed at how far behind I got on IT assignments -- this spring I did very little but sew Quilt National entries.  But I finally finished the autumn colors quilt.

After I finished the Quilt National things, I decided I needed to do some cleaning of the studio and was sorting and consolidating a bunch of samples that I had made in Nancy Crow workshops a long time ago.  I came upon this piece,

noticed the colors, and decided it might be recycled into an "autumn" quilt.

My first thought was just to take the left-hand part of the composition, trim it to IT size and quilt it, but then decided it needed something more.

















There were no leftover bits of the autumn colors fabric in the bag with this piece, but fortunately in my cleanup I had also come upon some yellow, orange and red fabrics that were sitting there waiting to be put away, and I used them for fine lines.  Here's what I came up with:

Green -- Kathy

I've had this quilt pretty much finished on the design wall for weeks, trying to decide if it needs some hand stitching in addition to the machine quilting.  I think it does, but lest everybody think I'm a slacker, thought I would post it anyway.

Several months ago I wrote in my blog about a quilt I really liked in a show, and about the pieced "ladders" that were an important design element.  Somebody left a comment that she wished she could figure out how to make pieced ladders, so I did a how-to blog post.  I used some blue and green fabrics that were sitting on my worktable waiting to be put away (I had given them to a quilting pal who needed more greens for a project, and she brought back what she hadn't used).

So having pieced enough ladders for the tutorial, I decided to make more and use them for my Green quilt.

Green:Lost in the reeds

With moving house and then Ian having surgery it's been a long,long time since I’ve done any sewing. But with Ian back at work,and inspired by FoQ (lovely to catch up with Uta and Gillian),I’ve made the first in the backlog and have ideas for others.I'm on a roll! This one is one of a series about losing my wedding and engagement rings while collecting rare fen orchids on Catfield Fen.The reeds are taller than I am! You can read more about this green series here.

"Green"

After I returned from Israel I wanted to start on the signs-and-symbols-challenge, because that was the one most overdue. (I hate being overdue, which is a constant status of mine at the library, too....) Instead, with Gillian's new challenge on my mind I went ahead and did the one to meet my challenge, 'green'.

It uses a piece of green hand-dyed linen which had been begging me to do something with it. And it uses a study piece I made in an online class where we were supposed to make a sketch letting us be inspired by a famous artist (for which I chose a mixture of M. Rothko and J. Albers).

This is what it looked like before it became part of this challenge - it had some machine quilting and some hand stitching, but it just didn't seem finished, and I was still debating which direction would be the most appropriate:

So I turned it by 180 degrees, added to the batting and the background and put my green linen around it.

Some more hand stitching, some quilting on the longarm, and a few other things added:

And this is the completed piece (no tunnel yet, but I am working on that one...).

"Greening Rothko", by Uta Lenk

'Meeting' in Birmingham

Last week it was the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham. Gillian is a standard there, and so is Margret, and this year I was lucky enough to be able to go, too.
So we took a picture of the three of us at the SAQA meeting.

Margret and I talked about how nice it would be to have a meeting where actually all of us could get together. Nothing planned yet - but perhaps one of the others has an idea where we could try to arrange for that?

New Challenge

It's my turn to choose a title for the next challenge

The title is Integration

I have chosen this as I have just spent 2 weeks in Israel and it seemed a very appropriate title.
There are so many ways that it could be interpreted
I am looking forward to see what you come up with

Gillian

Meeting in Israel

Gillian and Uta were invited teachers at the Israel Quilters Association this year, which gave the chance for a mini-meeting of more than half of the group in Israel.

Bella Kaplan, Gillian Travis, Uta Lenk and Eti David (from left)

My "Green" quilt

"autumn colours"

Just this morning I finished stitching "autumn colours".

I started by scrap piecing remnants in that colour range.

Then I overlaid it with an enlarged transfer of a drawing by Ellsworth Kelly. This required a bit of puzzling around, with mirror image and transfer etc.

not yet correct orientation of the overlay

And hand-stitched over that.

Some machine echoing for the background.

Of course, I ran out of bobbin thread less than 10" from the end, but that's the way it goes. And I had just about enough thread left to put that on the bobbin to last me to the very end:

And this is the finished piece (minus the tunnel, which will follow in due time):

Now for the signs and symbols... yeah.