Reflections
Despite the pandemic and the impact it has imposed on all of us and around the world, 2021 has also brought me happiness and joy, and some proud moments to celebrate. In the spirit of not dwelling on the negative, in today’s blog post I want to reflect back and share some of my personal highlights from this year.
I’m grateful for the love I share with Scot here at home, with my family in the Netherlands, and my closest friends who are spread around the world. Skype and Zoom have kept us all connected, and I traveled to the Netherlands for my mom’s 85th birthday recently; a wonderful reunion with her and my siblings and their partners. It seems I went just in time before new restrictions were introduced and traveling became (again) more challenging.
My journey as an artist has continued with quite a few firsts this year. I’m proud and grateful for all of them. This community of artists, quilters and people who understand the language of fabric has given me support and encouragement to keep developing my skills and to share my work with confidence. Putting my work out in the universe feels vulnerable; it’s like giving a piece of myself up for public viewing and scrutiny. But I’ve also found it very rewarding.
I finished 13 quilts this year, including 2 minis, not counting any tops that haven’t been quilted yet. This is the most productive I’ve been since I started working in my studio full time in 2019. The pandemic has brought distractions to a minimum, and I have shifted from mostly skill building to mostly creating original work.
A list of firsts this year
One of my quilts was selected for a book publishing and a showing in 2 museums. “Pandemonium” appeared in the special exhibition Quarantine Quilts: Creativity in the midst of Chaos, curated by Dr. Sandra Sider, curator of the Texas Quilt Museum and editor of SAQA’s Art Quilt Quarterly. The exhibition was shown from Jun-Aug in the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, KY, and from Sep-Dec in the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, MA.
Scot and I took a road trip to the Boston area in October and visited the museum in Lowell. I was super excited and it was quite a surreal feeling to see one of my quilts in a museum for the first time. Combined with a drive through the Berkshires, beautiful Fall foliage, and a visit to the Boston Museum of Fine Art to see the quilt exhibition Fabric of a Nation - American Quilt Stories (highly recommend it; on view till Jan 17, 2022), it was a wonderful trip. The accompanying book by Sandra Sider includes the 27 quilts from the exhibition, and about 70 more selected from the submissions.
I won my first ribbons this year! Three of my quilts were juried into the Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza exhibition in Philadelphia in September, and two of them were award winners. “Tiles” won a ribbon for best use of color, and “On the Fence” received an honorable mention, both in the category Mid Century Mod.
“Tiles” at the quilt show in Philadelphia
“On the Fence” at the quilt show in Philadelphia
In order to take my quilting to the next level I decided to invest in a longarm. I’d been pondering a while over this; it’s a big financial investment, and I had no room for it in my small studio. As I’ve been making larger quilts it had become very time consuming and difficult to finish them on my domestic machine. I also felt limited in the kind of quilting I wanted to do. So I made the commitment and invested in my future. We redistributed some space in our house and I expanded my studio to the adjacent bedroom. After some research and advice I decided on a Handiquilter Amara; it was installed mid November and I’ve been busy getting to know the machine.
For practice I finished a few quilts I had made from patterns a few years ago, but never got around to quilting. These will be donated to Afghan refugees in New Jersey; my local guild is collecting for them. I’m excited to put my first original work on the frame.
The Instagram quilting community has blown me away this year. The number of people who want to follow along on my creative journey jumped from 750 to 2,150 followers during the course of this year, which fills me with gratitude. While I’m not chasing likes and followers, it is very rewarding to receive feedback and encouragement through this channel. I love it when people engage and comment, and I love to learn about other artists’ work this way and engage with them. I create not because of it, but for the love of fabric in my hands, arranging colors into abstract designs, and making texture with needle and thread. I find it meditative, and it fulfills me with a deep sense of purpose I have not felt in all the years of my corporate career. I’m grateful I was able to choose this path.
Other highlights:
“Piece by Piece in Curated Quilts Magazine
Not a first, but I was thrilled that my mini “Piece by Piece” was selected for publication in the Curated Quilts Magazine’s Polygon Issue/17 in October. My one other and first publication in this beautiful magazine was in 2019. I had submitted a few minis for this quarterly challenge since, and it’s an honor to be selected again from the many submissions.
My focus this last year has been on improvisation and design skills and I have taken some great classes for that. In multiple workshops with Irene Roderick and Maria Shell I learned about design principles and elements, experimented with different improvisational processes, and realized how much I was still working from my head instead of my heart or gut. This was well invested time; I can feel how things have started to shift. I work more intuitively and draw from my own experiences and (some childhood) memories, and during the design process I worry less about how I’m going to construct this.
My 5 quilts going to QuiltCon in Feb 2022: “Perseverance”, “Bubbles”, “Clockwork Universe”, “Piece by Piece”, and “On the Fence”
And lastly, a few weeks ago when the QuiltCon confirmations went out, I was thrilled to learn that five of my quilts were accepted to QuiltCon. I had submitted seven this year. It left me speechless. The unpredictability of the selections for QuiltCon is a mystery that will remain forever unsolved, but I’m super excited to show my work in Phoenix next February. My travel arrangements were made long before I knew, and I would have enjoyed being there regardless, but this makes for an extra special event. I can’t wait to (re)connect with likeminded people, who share the love of modern quilting, and fiber and textile art. I also look forward to meeting some of the people I’ve connected with on Instagram in real life.
Thank you for reading my reflections and following along on my journey. I only wrote four blog posts this year (including this one), which is a reflection of how much I’ve focused on creating versus writing about it, not a verdict on my desire to write. I definitely aspire to write more next year.
I wish you all a creative, productive, happy and healthy 2022!