Romance on the Rhine River Cruise

 My friend Clare and I joined the Romance on the Rhine Quilting Tour last month, it was run by Travelrite. It was very well organised and the celebrity host was Michelle Marvig, who has been travelling the world doing tours for years.

It was an 8 night cruise along the mid Rhine River in Germany on the A Rosa Brava. We had upgraded to a Juliette Balcony, which meant we had a double door that opened onto the water.

A Rosa Brava Room

It was a lovely cruise and the food was wonderful. We were the first Australians that the cruise had ever hosted and they seemed to enjoy our enthusiasm. It might have been a bit of a shock to the mainly German passengers to have 35 Australian quilters on board.

A Rosa Brava 

Our first stop was Rudesheim, we were taken on a tour through the beautiful city. We came across the oldest house that had luckily been spared any bomb damage during the war, it is from 1500! The stories that house could tell. It's a shame that the red van was parked in front of it.

Rudesheim House

One of our many activities was to go to Siegfried's Mechanical Musical Cabinet where we were treated a concert by the many restored and fully working, huge music boxes.

Siegfried's Mechanical Musical Cabinet. 

The next day we arrived at Nierstein, which was a lovely gentle, small village.

Nierstein

We walked around town, exploring the church and streets, stopped at a cafe for morning tea and then spent the afternoon on the boat doing our hexagon project. Michelle Marvig had supplied us all with a kit to make a table runner with pink hexagons and a lovely bird fabric for the centre. Food and drinks were all supplied on board so we had to keep the waiters busy serving us with a cocktail! 

Sewing hexagons

The following day we went to Strasbourg, the weather was perfect and I thought Strasbourg was very beautiful, just like a postcard.

Strasbourg

We walked around town and found the Notre Dame Cathedral, which is the same design as the one in Paris.

Strasbourg Notre Dame Cathedral

It was the first time I had seen a European Cathedral and I was very impressed.

We also visited the Decorative Arts Museum and saw so many beautiful things. Here is an amazing clock.

Clock in the Decorative Arts Museum, Strasbourg

The following Day we went to Mainz. We saw a beautiful Boroque Church and learnt all about Gutenburg who invented the printing press and then we went to St Stephen's Church which had windows designed by the artist Marc Chagall.

Marc Chagall's Church windows

Clare and I tried selfies every so often but we weren't very good at it!

Gutenberg Statue

We didn't set sail that night because they wanted us to sail during the day so we could see the beautiful UNESCO Heritage listed middle section of the Rhine. We sailed past so many beautiful houses, castles and vineyards.

Look at the photo below and see the vineyards on the side of the hill, I don't know how they tend them without rolling downwards.

We sailed past the famous Loreley Rock, where legends said the siren Loreley lured the sailors to their death in a very narrow section of the Rhine.

Loreley Rock

The ship played the Loreley music and Hans our entertainment guy sang the Loreley song as we sailed past. Here is the Loreley statue.

Loreley Statue

That afternoon, we stopped at Koblenz and had another walking tour through the town. Their emblem is the spitting boy fountain, every so often he spits out water and tourists get wet, which they think is very funny.

Spitting Boy Statue

Koblenz Square

We stopped at Bonn for our last full day on the cruise. Bonn used to be the capital city of Germany before the wall came down, after that Berlin became the capital. Bonn, is lovely with a huge university. I really loved Bonn because we went to the house where Beethoven was born. It felt very special to be there and walk around the house which was set up as a museum to Beethoven with lots of info about him. He lived there until he was 22 and then he went to Vienna for a job with the orchestra.

I didn't get a good photo of the front of Beethoven's house, I only took one of the back of the house.

Beethoven Birth place 

Beautiful Bonn

I loved seeing a book that Beethoven actually composed in, especially those crossings out, an example of an artist at work.

Beethoven's music book

Me with Beethoven Statue in the garden

Across the road from Beethoven's house was a large gift shop dedicated to Beethoven. I bought a couple of scarves with music notes on them, chocolate, a little music box that plays Song of Joy (Beethoven's 9th Symphony), a pen and eraser. I didn't have much spare space in my suitcase for many purchases.

Feeling a little sad that our cruise was finishing, we said good bye to the ship and a bus drove us to Frankfurt. We were catching a plane from Frankfurt airport because we were going to spend four days in Denmark.

Our plane didn't leave until late in the afternoon and so we could spend the day looking around. It was a Sunday and all the shops in Europe close on Sundays so they can spend time with their families. We didn't know how we were going to spend the day with the shops closed. Luckily, the old town tourist area was open, so we could look at Souvenir shops, have morning tea and lunch and an ice-cream because it was quite warm.

Frankfurt was another gorgeous town, I suppose the locals just take those picturesque old buildings for granted.

Frankfurt, Germany

Although we were sad to leave Europe, we knew our holiday was not over because we were off to Denmark for another adventure.

What I loved about Europe was the beautiful, fairytale like architecture, their delicious melt in the mouth pastries and their lovely shops, where I could have spent a fortune, if I had space in my suitcase.

It was interesting to learn about how the World Wars affected their towns and how many times the French and Germans have been at odds with each other. It was also interesting to learn that most of their towns are built on top of Roman Ruins, we saw lots of Roman ruins on our tours.

Whenever they decide to upgrade a building or decide to pull one down to build a bigger more useable one, the archeologists move in to research the Roman Ruins and remove the artifacts for museums.

One building site was told the archeologists would take 6 months but 8 years later, it was still a building site!

I will talk about the rest of my trip in another post.

Bye for now,

Linda

European Patchwork Meeting 2023

 I arrived home from my wonderful European holiday with Covid! I had avoided it for all this time; anyway, I am better now and can start to get back to normal.

We had wonderful weather on our holiday and loved the European Patchwork meeting in France. It is set in the Alsace region amongst four gorgeous villages.

Our tour group stayed out of town and so we arrived by bus and spent two days at the show.

This is the entrance to the main town, Saint Marie aux Mines.

In those tents were lots of businesses selling their wares, which led to the main building that was filled with various patchwork businesses, selling fabric, thread and patterns etc.

All the buildings, halls and churches were filled with various quilt displays from around the world.  We walked around each village looking at all the exhibitions.

Here are a couple of photos that I took as I walked around so you can see how picturesque it is.

There were wonderful bouquets of flowers decorating the streets and window boxes.

We started off with morning tea, how I adored the French bakeries, everything is so light, fluffy and delicious.

I loved the exhibition of coats by Marijke van Welzen.

The Seamstress by Marijke van Welzen

Here is a detail photo.

Of course, I also loved the under water coat.

Underwonder World by Marijke van Welzen

There were so many gorgeous coats, here is another one but I didn't get the name of it.

Flower coat by Marijke van Welzen

I felt very tempted to start making coats!!

Another exhibition in a church was called Perspectives on the Natural World. Here are two of the quilts.

Palila by Phillis Cullen

Nature's Distraction by Heather Bennett

In another village was an exhibition by artists around the world called 15 x 15 where they took their inspirations from famous artists. Here are just a couple of them.

David Hockney by Helen Hazen

Frida Kahlo by Sonia Ruiz

Mondrian by Greetje Hein

There was a whole room of wonderful examples and I took so many photos.

There was another exhibition of quilts by Spanish quilter Inmaculada Gabaldon. Her quilts look like watercolour paintings to me.

Las Aparioncias Enganan by Inmaculada Gabaldon

Libres Para Volver al Carnaval by Inmaculada Gabaldon

Todos Diferentes by Inmaculada Gabaldon

There was another exhibition of quilts by a Korean artist called Jongkyeong Lee.

Essay on Transparency by Jongkyeong Lee

The photos I have shown are just a small section of the hundreds of photos I took. There were many traditional displays too but with only two days there, I had to concentrate on the art quilts. As well as seeing all the displays there were lots of shops, lectures, talking to people, eating and travelling on the shuttle bus to get to the different villages.

I wish that we could have stayed longer. I am planning to go back in 2026. I had lunch one day with a lady that organises the exhibitions and we have arranged an exhibition of Australian quilts in 2026. How exciting.

I think that it is my favourite quilt show ever, as well as there being so many exhibitions, the setting is so beautiful. Inspiration overload, I couldn't wipe the smile from my face.

I will write more about my wonderful holiday in another post.

Bye for now,

Linda

Classes

 I have been busy trying to tie up loose ends after having quite a busy year. I have finished a new quilt that I cannot show anyone yet and have been doing my Art Quilters homework for the rest of the year!

Next week, I am going on a European holiday to France for the European Patchwork Meeting and then a Rhine River Cruise. I don't want to come home to a mess and not know how to get back into things again.

I had signed up for an Art and Design Course using a gel plate with Tara Axford. It was a good class but trying to do the class as well as doing all the other things I do was a bit of a stretch and I have not finished doing the work!

The idea was to learn how to tame the gel plate and not have everything an experiment and left to chance. We made lots of prints onto paper and then had to put them into sketchbooks and write about  what we have learnt.

Here is some of the work that I did.

Leaf study

Botanicals

Collage

Image Transfer

I belong to Waverley Patchworkers and every two years they run a special workshop that is heavily subsidised by the club and lunch and morning tea is provided.

This year the tutor was the wonderfully talented Gloria Loughman. I have known Gloria for a while but we got to know each other better on the Morocco trip last year.

I packed a whole lot of fabrics for the class and when I got there, Gloria had her gorgeous hand dyes for sale so I bought her fabrics and did one of her patterns instead, for fun.

I really enjoyed the class and made a sunset scene which is something I have never done before.

First we fused steam a seam 2 onto our sky fabrics and then cut them into pieces and placed them onto a base fabric. Then we cut strips of fabric for the foreground.

Background

When the background was complete we added a tree or whatever we were making.

Sunset

I loved my finished piece and it was good to catch up with my friends from the club. 

Well, I have a long list of little jobs to complete before I am off on my holiday. My travel mate is a lovely friend that I met on the Morocco tour, you just never know where life will take you!

I'll be back at the end of September!!

Bye for now,

Linda

Eco Dyeing at Tarndie

 Last weekend, I was down at Geelong for the Art Quilt Australia Awards, my last post was all about my excitement of winning First Prize.

The following day some of us drove down to Tarndwarncoort Sheep Farm or Tarndie for short, for a day of Eco Dyeing.

It is one of the oldest sheep farms and properties in Australia and was built in 1848 and now classified as a National Trust property. The same family still owns the property as it has been handed down through the generations.

As it was a sheep farm, we were dyeing using wool fabrics, they were quite thick upholstery fabric that they got in for us to use as they specialise in dyeing yarns.

First we dyed some fabric using Cherry Ballart or wild Cherry with some copper which gives a lovely Chartreuse colour and then we learnt about Indigo dyeing.

These are the fabrics that I did. I have ironed the fabrics but couldn't get the wrinkles out, so I won't be using upholstery fabric if I ever do it again.

 The Indigo vat seems like a lot of work, so I was glad to see it done but probably won't add it to my bag of tricks.

Our last technique was eco dyeing with leaves. I have done it before with iron water, so I took the opportunity to use copper instead to get an orange colour.

Here I am arranging my leaves onto the fabric.

This is a photo of all our fabrics on copper pipes after being steamed.

 Here is the big reveal when we unrolled them and took off the leaves.

We had a lovely lunch in the dining room of the old house.

We also had a walk around the farm even though it was a bit of a wet, cold day. They keep Polwarth sheep which have the brown faces. The sheep in the photo below had twins and you can see a white lamb with them. The white lamb kept following the other mother with the twins, probably wanted some playmates.

Polwarth Sheep

Despite the cold weather, it was an enjoyable day and lovely to get to know the other women who mostly came from interstate.

Bye for now,

Linda

Art Quilt Australia 2023

 Oh my goodness- I won!!

I drove down to Geelong on Friday for the Ozquilt Network opening of Art Quilt Australia 2023. It was held in the National Wool Museum. I was very happy to be selected, the jurors chose 37 quilts out of 76 entries. It was good to meet up with quilters that I know and also put faces to names that I know.

I was innocently sitting down listening to the speeches and the winners being announced, when suddenly my name was called out as the winner of the Award of Excellence, which is the top award! I was in shock, I never in a thousand years thought I would win this prize. I received a beautiful bunch of flowers and $4,000! My quilt is called Moroccan Magic and was inspired by my trip to Morocco last year.

After the awards were announced we could look at the exhibition and the artists that were there could do a 2 minute talk about their quilt. I took a few photos but really I was in too much shock to take it all in.

Here are some of the photos that I took.

Alison Withers won the Wool prize, it has to be made by at least 60% wool.

DIY Deluge Design no 5 by Alison Withers

The Silent Web by Cindy Watkins

Dianne Firth won the Highly Commended Award.

Deposit by Dianne Firth

Simple Pleasures by Sue Broadway

Seeking the Sun by Grace Widders

Forest Floor by Linda Balding

Clap Clap You by Tania Tanti

The exhibition is open until the 12th November, so I will try and get back there to have a good look at all the entries.

Here is a photo of my quilt called Moroccan Magic. It is improv pieced, I have no pattern, I just start sewing and put fabrics together, piece by piece while thinking about my subject. 

Moroccan Magic by Linda Steele

Here are some detail photos.

Moroccan Magic detail

Moroccan Magic detail

Moroccan Magic detail

My artist statement said Morocco is a sensory overload, with its doorways, winding pathways and exotic markets.

The have a lovely catalogue too which has large photos of all the quilts for only $20.

Bye for now,

Linda