I split up the return drive spending a night in Memmingen, a city I was really only aware of from a severe court case many years ago that made it into the nation’s newspapers and that has always been a scar on my image of Bavaria. So much so that I never thought about going to look at the town - it does have a really pretty old town and is very picturesque.
So after a really tiring week - two days of driving, four days of show, two days of driving - I immediately went back to two days of teaching. But now my class in doing two weeks of practicum and I am ‘on vacation’. Well - not really, except for the fact that on Thursday I just needed to hang out, not do much, catch my breath. But all week I have also been working on preparations for the textile art symposium. I am one by one securing handwritten versions of some of the articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that I am using as the message for the quilt I want to make. Here is my student Puji writing Article No. in Thai, which really is a fantastic script.
At first I let the writers chose themselves, but now that a number of articles already have been taken it is fun to consider which person or which language is the right one at this stage for a particular language. For example, I chose my Hungarian-born colleague to write the article on the right for demonstrations and expression of opinion on Hungarian. She loved that, too.
Yesterday I started stitching the intermediate layer after some procrastination, which resulted in some changes of design and orientation.
And as I am stitching some of the what I consider key phrases of the preamble, I am beginning to really fall in love with these words.
Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all the members of the human family.
Freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want.
Dignity and worth of the human person.
Equal rights of men and women.
Spending a week away from home again. I have an exhibition at the Biennale International d’Art Textile in Villefranche-sur-Saone, where I had already been once two years ago with an exhibition for International Threads. Contrary to original plans I had to drive because of the train strikes in France, and although I was a bit non-plussed about that, I was kind of glad I hadn’t bought a ticket earlier because there are no refunds when there are strikes and I would have been rather mad about that. This was I spent two days driving, broke the journey visiting my best friend whom I hadn’t seen in person in a while and listened to several more of the 16 CDs of my favorite audio book while traversing Switzerland.
The exhibition was put up really quickly and I am very pleased at how good it looks.
Empty walls at 1:30 p.m.
I have incorporated one quilt which I made for an International Threads challenge into the text messages series, as I think ‘Girl Power’ has a text message in the broad definition of text as linguists would use it, and I used to be a linguist… so now there are 17 pieces in the whole series, and 14 of these are on display.
It’s good to see many people again, I hope to meet new people, and although I think 4 days with opening hours from 9.30 to 18 o’clock is a bit on the longish side, I am enjoying the show.
Slower hours can be filled with stitching - either adding on to 'A Scrap a Day' (with slightly relaxed rules during these days, I may add more pieces per day for the time being), or continuing on a middling I am making for the 70,273 Project, including teaching myself a new and complicated stitch that I now at least understand, even though I won't claim I have mastered it.