Today I received an email telling me that this quilt, My Calendar, has been juried into the travelling textile art exhibition a matter of time. I am overjoyed!!!
When the call for entries for this exhibition came out I immediately thought of making a Tardis quilt. My boys would love it! But there would be copyright issues, so I dropped that idea. I thought about hourglasses and sundials, but I wanted to make an abstract quilt rather than a pictorial one. And then the idea of a calendar struck me - my personal calendar, with important dates marked on it. Here is a drawing I made back in August:
I made one block (February - the 2nd is my eldest son's birthday) in September (I showed it here) but the size wasn't right, so I made another one.
And then other projects demanded my attention and the blocks were put away. The deadline, January 15th, came nearer and nearer, as did the summer holidays, and I decided not to enter this exhibition as I would never be able to finish the quilt in time.
On Boxing Day we went on a camping holiday, and we came home on the 3rd of January. In the week that followed I saw friends on Facebook mentioning that they were working hard to finish their entry in time, and suddenly I remembered my design... I dug up the blocks, found that I really liked the idea of this quilt, and decided to finish it after all!
Of course it was (and is) still school holidays, so I couldn't just sew all day, but in the end the quilt was finished at 3pm on January 15th. A frantic photography session followed - it was nicely overcast but very windy, so I had to use BlueTack on the fence to keep the quilt from blowing up!
But I got it done, and I put it up on the wall over our dining table. The boys love finding their own birthdays on it.
And now it's selected! I am so happy. Here is my artist's statement:
Certain dates – April 2nd, July 29th, December 12th, to name but a few - are engraved in my mind. The birthdays of loved ones, our wedding day, the days our children were born… But also the days on which people very dear to me died. In every year that passes these dates are highlighted in the calendar in my mind, as red days or black days. This is my calendar.
