First you create art quilts, then you learn to sew

Wonderful Heike teaches sewing in the same culture center where I showed my paintings,  she saw them and my quilts, and we got connected and started a conversation. I complained about my self-taught, rather poor ability of hand-quilting, and she said something nice about the art qualities of my quilts. So I enrolled for her sewing course to base my work on improved craft knowlege. She asked me whether this style of working might influence the spontaneous and creative side of it, but I don't think I have to worry, I rather see lacking experience as an obstacle to creative work. So I'm happy to learn from Heike. I chose a few fabrics from my favourite stash and decided to do a diagonal nine-patch with triangle corners in the quilt-as-you-go method. This is the start of a quilt I call Ba-Gua, referring to the 8 basic signs of the I-Ging Chinese oracle book. This one is "Water", connected to danger, black color, fish, kidneys, fear and pride.

Like in a poor country

This morning we woke up and didn't have water supply. So we took what we still had in bottles and the water can, and my husband was able to wash and clean teeth. He was pi... off.
I made it worse with my good mood, and when Jan Delay was on the radio, I turned it loud and danced. "Wir machen das klar" -- "We'll fix it!"







The husband went to work. I'm still waiting. The caretaker said, a pipe was broken, now they are working on it. I'll have to wait until 10 a.m., he said.

Thinking that I could go to the pond to get some water. Thinking about the places where people don't have access to clean water... I'd have to go to the creek and make tea with what I scoop out of it. What a feeling.

An hour later

I tried to get water and almost fell into the creek. The muddy banks are very slippery. The water looks quite clean if not stirred; in emergency, I would not hesitate to cook it. The creek is so shallow that I could have scooped 1/10 of the bucket. I gave up and went to the supermarket and got 3 big bottles of water, 0.25 $ each. When I came home at 10:30, the water was there. Good.

Wir machen das klar!