EngelBee

GROOVY

NIAGARAFALLS

WARM

MOVEMENT

YELLOW

Title of the quilt: „Veränderung ist immer und überall“ (Change is always and everywhere)

Size: circa 105 x 79cm (41 x 31 inch)

Material: cotton, silk, wool, viscose, blended and synthetic fabric, some other materials like different threads, yarns, felted wool, Velcro, etc.

When I saw my words, I first had no idea what to do with them. I had to think about for weeks that became months. By and by partly ideas arised for a quilt. At the end I had two finished designs in mind, but unfortunately too less time to make them both. Indeed, I changed the original idea a little while my work progressed.

Actually I had in mind to make a small 5 word quilt, but I got the word NIAGARAFALLS. The NIAGARAFALLS are big, very big. So my quilt is also big, at least the size accordant to the rules. It pictures stylized waterfalls. The colors are blue, turquoise and green, from a very light, nearly white to dark. The blue of the water is changing during the day, during the year depending on the weather and season. I wanted to show it at different times.

In the waterfalls are several YELLOW pieces. Maybe those are reflections of the sun? However, to show a wide spectrum of the color, I used for each fragment another YELLOW fabric.

The water running down the falls is never WARM. Furthermore green and blue are cold colors. To integrate the word in my quilt I used some WARM materials, especially wool, exactly felted wool, beside the warm YELLOW colorings.

The most interesting and important word for me was MOVEMENT. Waterfalls are always on the move, day and night, summer and winter, every second. They are constantly changing . The longer I thought about this, the more I realized that movement is everywhere, changing anytime, inside me and around me, every second in life. Sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it’s slow, sometimes it’s more apparently, sometimes nearly covert, sometimes it’s big, sometimes it’s small, sometimes it’s pleasant, sometimes not. I can like the MOVEMENT and changing or not, but I have to accept them anyway. I think it’s easier to take it positive. Therefore I made a quilt that is not fixed. I can change the look by moving the strips. Each pieced strip can switch place with another pieced strip and each felted strip can do the same. Furthermore they can be turned upside down and back. A student figured out that there are more then 18 000 different possibilities. Even I know there are many, many possibilities, but this number is unbelievable. If it’s right, I can change it every day to have another quilt until I will be nearly 100 years old.

My fifth word was GROOVY. It’s a word of enthusiasm. Not for everybody is the same thing GROOVY. For me this quilt is very GROOVY! It contains so many different fabrics, from thin organza to stiff upholstery fabric and from silk thread to raw wool. Then it is changeable in so many ways. At least the design and construction was a challenge, but I could manage it. Therefore the work and the result are GROOVY!

Marlis