I read quite a lot, particularly when you take into account the audio books I have playing when my hands are busy quilting.  I have three on the go at the moment, all with a strong foundation of history.

        Tonight I might finish this fascinating book, ‘Conquistador’ by Buddy Levy, telling of the Spaniard Hernan Cortes’ setting out from Cuba to conquer the Aztecs of Mexico and other groups of people in the region at the time in the quest for new dominions and treasure for Spain. Fascinating and quite bloody,  but I am really enjoying it.   I shied away from history at school because of the incredibly boring teaching style of our history teacher.  Years later, long after I graduated from university without modern history under my belt, I discovered how interesting it really is  – the power of a teacher, good or bad, to influence life choices!

I’ve been reading but was interrupted and haven’t gone back yet, to Richard Flanagan’s ‘The Narrow Road To The Deep North’,   about an Australian doctor who went to war and ended up as POW of the Japanese, working on the Burmese railway to India. It was last year’s Man Booker Prize winner; and such a powerful, wonderful read that I need to put down every now and then to think about what I have just read.  I guess it was at one such point a week or so ago that I realised that as Conquistador is one of the new books in the book club I belong to, it must be returned this wednesday and so I’m focusing on finishing it by tomorrow evening to avoid the late fine 😉

    Last but not least, I am listening to John Maulden and Jonathan Tepper’s  ‘Code Red, How to Protect Your Savings from the Coming Crisis’  Definitely don’t put retirement savings in the banks I’ve learned, and taken in a bit about why – so we’re on track there.  A fascinating snippet from this afternoon’s listening  is that the population of Japan is so heavily weighted with seniors and retirees at the top of the demographic table that the population is shrinking or will soon do so, and that in Japan in 2012 sales of adult diapers/napkins outperformed sales of infants diapers/napkins for the first time  !!

Sunburnt Textures 6 is on the verge of leaving  for exhibition in Golden Textures, at the Goldfields Art Gallery, Maryborough, Victoria, Australia, opening on 21st February, and where it will be showing for 6 weeks.  If you are passing through or live in that area, try to visit what sounds like a wonderful contemporary art quilt exhibition.

I really didn’t want the quilt to be folded for the long trip from Montevideo to Maryborough: I wanted it rolled so that after a week+ maybe 9 days in transit it would be ready to hang, falling perfectly flat without any creases.  For some time I’d thought ‘So I’ll wrap it around a pool noodle and pin in place’ .   Silly me though, I made it a bit too wide to squeeze into a Fedex mailing tube (1m) , and I didn’t want to cut some inches off the sides – which could have been done, of course, except that it was professionally photographed  back in November.   However, when I confirmed that it doesn’t have to be in Fedex packaging, I took myself to the neighbourhood hardware store the other day, and bought a suitable length of white polyvinyl pipe 15cm inside diameter, of the finest/lightest weight they had – plus a pair of ends/lids and some duct tape  they happened to have in white –  perfect.

Everything has been labelled with my name – the tube inside and out, the two lids, the quilt, the pool noodle and the grey cloth bag it goes in before being put in the tube. I took pics of the different stages of packing the quilt – collaged several and used this 4-in-1 pic to illustrate the sheet of clear, brief unpacking/repacking instructions I’m enclosing in the tube:

To unpack from mailing tube:

1. Remove and keep both white duct tape and the lid from one end of the polyvinyl pipe container – NB this tape can be re-used many times.
2. Remove grey cloth bag – named – please keep for re-use.
3. From the bag carefully remove the quilt – it has 3-d elements well sewn on, but, anyway, please just be careful!
4. Remove pins from along the edge – keep these for later by sticking them into the end of the noodle.
5. Unroll the quilt – notice it was very firmly rolled around the noodle inside the sleeve, with front side facing to the outside of the roll, and this needs to be done at the end of the exhibition, too.
6. Remove yellow pool noodle from inside the sleeve, and put the rest of the pins into it, place in the grey bag, and return all that packaging to polyvinyl pipe container; replace the lid onto the open end, and save it all for re-use at the end of the exhibition.

At the end of the exhibition:    

1. Take the lid off the container and remove the grey bag and the pool noodle with pins stored on it.
2. Insert the pool noodle into the sleeve – and secure by pressing pins through into the noodle every 15cm approx. along where the binding meets the orange.(upper left)
3. Roll the quilt as firmly/tightly as possible, with the front side facing to the outside of the roll.(upper right)
4. Secure the outer edge with the remaining pins pressed into the noodle. (lower left)
5. Slide the rolled quilt into the grey bag. (lower right)
6. Carefully push the rolled, bagged quilt into the polyvinyl pipe, being careful not to damage the 3-d elements – which you might need to press down a little to help them past the lip of the pipe without being pulled off/damaged.

Replace the lid and secure with the remaining duct tape

…………………………….

I’m emailing a copy of the sheet to the gallery with tracking number for the consignment, and reasonably hopeful all packaging will be kept and used properly to send the quilt to a new owner or return it to me after the exhibition.

By the end of  1995 I was getting sick of strong bright, even hectic, colours and wanting to work in some more soothing neutrals.  Was this an antidote to the fast pace of change I/we’d gone through?   Possibly – relocating back to one’s own country after several years away involved a lot of change – and it’s something that will probably loom again later this year, and I wonder if it will be reflected in what I do creatively…

“Winter Beach 1995”  approx 150cm w  x  90cm h is from this period.      No sashings or borders; machine quilted in the ditch and hand quilted down the middle of each strip insert, faced.   One of my favourite ways to make a quilt at that time was to run linear inserts across a width of fabric, wandering and crossing over at random, and then cutting into segments=blocks to be joined with others.  For a big project, selvedge to selvedge x  8″ wide is efficient and produces 6 x 6 1/2″ blocks – but of course the same procedure applies whatever size/width of fabric you have.  On a large scale several years later and back in stronger colour, this method produced Ivan and Tara’s Wedding Quilt 2000, 2.5m x 2.75m , 96″ x 108″, which also had a double pillow sham … quilted in the ditch and down the middle of each strip insert.   Every now and then while making it, I did wonder what I was thinking, but reminded myself it was for newly weds in the family.  

“Grey Landscape” 1996,   130cm w x 150cm h.