The special exhibits seem to be a bit of a poor relation at the IFQ. Apart from the galleries on the website they receive minimal publicity. At least I’ve found next to nothing by googling. The most information I found was on this blog at chron.com, which appears to be the online presence of the Houston Chronicle newspaper.

So here finally I present Use Your Eyes, my last quilt made before packing up the studio for its move to Spain.


The quilt explores the idea of words as a design element. My inspiration came from reading about Notan, the Japanese concept involving the play and placement of light and dark next to the other. By exploring the balance of the positive and negative shapes in words and reducing the contrast in the shading so that the viewer is uncertain which shape is the positive and which the negative, the text presents a visual challenge. The intention is that at first glance the words should not be instantly recognizable. The challenge to myself as the designer was to use the complementary colors of red and green, but to achieve a balance in the values in each word to support the uncertainty regarding the positive and negative spaces. I chose a favorite quotation by the Australian artist Ken Done for my text and arranged the words as a word cloud giving greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. The title of the quilt Use Your Eyes is taken from the quote and is meant as an invitation to the viewer to stop and study the quilt and discover the text in the design.

As for my new studio: I was in Spain for 10 days getting back last Wednesday. We were supposed to take possession of the house on the Tuesday, but things didn’t go according to plan. There is still work going on inside the house – bathrooms not finished, painting still to be done etc. We camped in it, in a fairly primitive manner, from the Saturday and poor Sqeze is camping there still. The kitchen was handed over to him on Friday, so at least he will be able to eat more than bread and cheese soon. It will be a while yet before the studio can be commissioned.

Well today I received an email to tell me that I’ve made it into the second round of judging for inclusion into the gallery section of the book. Apparently there was such a huge response that a second round became necessary. Now I have to wait until early 2012 to hear whether Dad’s portrait makes it into the book or not. I also have to get through the vetting process to ensure that the images satisfy the technical specifications. I don’t expect that to be a problem because Sqeze took great care to follow the letter of the law on that account – that was one of the reasons for photographing outside in the rain – to get the best light possible as no manipulation of the images was allowed.

And this is me when I discovered that my quilt was featured in the catalogue for the main venue in Houston. Pity my name was spelt wrongly in the credits. Everyone always wants to add a second “e” into our surname. Obviously 4 letters are just too few. Didn’t stop me grinning like the Cheshire Cat though.

Now the quilt can be taken to the house to be packed away ready for its journey to Spain.

Anyway back to the positive things in life. The TOT exhibition will be shown at all three of the IQA events in Houston, Cincinnati, and Long Beach in 2011 and 2012. Other venues may follow. The quilt will be on its travels for 3 years. That makes it rather tricky giving a return address as I’m not sure where I will be in September 2014. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

No pictures allowed until its debut in the exhibit at the festival, but I thought I would give a little teaser describing the design process. I decided to explore the idea of words as a design element quite literally. My inspiration came as a result of taking the course Working in Series with Elizabeth Barton at QU where I learnt about Notan, the Japanese concept involving the play and placement of light and dark next to the other. I explored the balance of the positive and negative shapes in letters and words. (The importance of the negative space in design was also something Elizabeth mentioned in the classes.) I developed my own alphabet font with the intention that the viewer should be uncertain which shape is the positive and which the negative. At first glance the words should not be instantly recognizable.

I think that is all I can say now and not give anything away. It’s such a shame that the venues are across the pond as that almost certainly means I won’t get to see the exhibit. I haven’t seen the 2010 one either and have been unable to find any mention or images much on the www. In the end we didn’t make the trip the Open European Quilt Exhibition in the Netherlands, because there was never any mention on the website that the exhibit was going to be shown there. It would have been interesting to see how the other artists approached the theme of text on textiles. The positive side is that it left me with no pre-conceived notions when I started off on the design process for my 2011 entry.

The weather wasn’t co-operating and rained most of the time so that we weren’t able to get the photos taken outside. We ended up shifting the furniture around in the lounge, opening the terrace doors and hanging the quilt inside the room near the doors. My long suffering DH photographer had to stand out in the soaking wet bushes to get far enough away to get the full sized image of the quilt. And then I had problems uploading the images to the website, probably due to our useless “high”/low speed internet access. I hope it will have been worth all the stress to get finished that comes on top of all the other stress due to (we hope) imminent removal projects. (Half the house contents into a small flat for me here in DE and half the house contents to our new home in ES.)

If all plans do come to fruition this may well be the last large quilt I make for some time. I shall have to find a more portable form of creative expression to keep me occupied in my evenings and weekends without visits.

On Sunday I dyed three metres of fabric for the backing and the binding. So I’m all set up for this coming weekend, when I intend to get started on the quilting. I shall have to take a trip into town on Saturday to stock up on thread as I don’t have all the colours I need. I’m looking forward to that because I’ve found a new shop via the internet that looks very promising. I think it may the same shop I’ve used in the past, but moved into bigger and better premises. After the trip I should be set up with everything I need to complete the quilt. As the coming weekend is also a long one (Monday is another public holiday here in Germany) I’m hoping to make good progress.

It feels good to be working on a large piece of textile art again.

Update (2011-06-11):
Been to the shop this morning. It is the same one as I have used in the past – TOKO Kurzwaren in Frankfurt am Main. They moved to the new premises at the beginning of the year. The new shop is double the area of the old one and also much lighter and airier. They have added some fabrics and buttons to the range of goods they sell. A big improvement – I hope they continue to stay in business.

I spent 57€ on thread a few other bits and pieces that I needed. It’s amazing how it all adds up.

The problem is not that I am not working. The problem is that I am working on a quilt for an entry to a juried exhibition. The rules forbid you to enter any piece of work that has been published anywhere before – including on blogs and websites. As I don’t have the time to be working on more than one project at once, this unfortunately means that I have nothing to show my blog.

I can’t say that I really understand the reasoning behind this entry condition. Textile art is so difficult to photograph so that you really appreciate the piece to the full, that even if I had seen a piece of art on someone’s website or blog I would still leap at the chance to see it in person. I can understand that organisers want to have new work in their exhibitions and not pieces that have been touted around the exhibition circuit, but having to keep the wraps on entirely is a bit frustrating. And should I get this quilt finished in time and it does get accepted into the exhibition, it will be a good few months yet until I can reveal all.

After some more thought and revisiting my favourite quilt artists I realised that I am more drawn to non-realistic than realistic or abstract themes, so I hardened up my ideas and started to concentrate on squares and grids. I felt this was a bit wider than just Amish quilt designs and had more possibilities to make it my own. I worked for a couple of days on a mind map, which turned out pretty huge. Elizabeth said I had enough ideas that I was set up with a series of series! Here is a brief summary of the mind map. The main branches are

• Amish layouts
• colour schemes
• quadrilaterals (all shapes that have 4 sides)
• designing my own block (dividing the square with lines)
• ideas for variation in the squares – lots of sub-branches here – exploring texture, colour, adding layers
• other ideas (looking at tartans, de-constructing grids, …)
• quick look at elements of design

Then along came the next lesson with various exercises for working on your ideas to arrive at potential designs. One of them was to go out with a camera and look for images that correspond to your theme. Since it was such a nice weekend we decided to get outdoors and enjoy the weather. An hour of walking around in Bad Homburg looking for grids and squares resulted in over 100 images. I chose a few of them and printed them out in black and white. Today I set about simplifying the images into sketches that might be worth translating into fabric. It wasn’t as easy as I thought and some of the images that looked interesting as photographs, became quite boring when reduced to a line drawing.

Here are my the results of a few hours work this afternoon.