The Series 'Play of Lines' and how it came about

Hilary has asked my to write something about the quilt featured in the SAQA Journal. In fact, I haven't seen the journal itself yet, somebody only sent me a scan. I hope I will eventually receive a copy... but of course I did give input to the article.
The quilt shown is this one:

Play of Lines IV

It is one of the early pieces in my series 'Play of Lines' (you can see more pieces from the series here), which, as the article states, was inspired by my son's early drawings. It continued up to no. 40, although not all of these quilts were made from his drawings. 
In the series I was working on exploring the relationship between lines and their contexts, changing the original inspiration, working on color combinations, different arrangements - basically doing the 'working in a series' exercises that one does when one is trying to develop an own voice. One quilt would frequently lead to another idea, and I worked on that series for several years.
I used only hand-dyed fabrics, mostly my own, only very few from other dyers, and that was when I also started my business with hand-dyed fabrics. (Which I recently discontinued.)  
This particular quilt was the first attempt at using a particular drawing by my son, and I was still struggling to find my bearings, but I was determined to use yellow, which is my favorite color. Because I ran into quite a few problems along the way while making this piece, I then started developing a technique of individually crafted paper templates that made it easier to achieve proper joinings of seams because I did not really like the effect I arrived at with this one. However, come to think of it, perhaps I should try again. Make this one over, in different colors, certainly it would turn out differently... As I often said to the students who were taking the class that was based on this technique: you never know when a series is finished, there might still be a piece waiting down the line that belongs into this particular sequence!

 

Self-introduction: Uta

My grandmother taught me how to knit when I was about five or six years old, and I have been involved with textiles ever since. Patchwork came into my life when I was an exchange student in High School in the US and saw the first patchwork pillows. After a period of self-taught traditional patterns (before the age of internet etc.) I turned to contemporary design in 1994: My mother’s cure for my then newly broken heart was an enrollment in a patchwork class. I started teaching patchwork classes and hand-dyeing my own fabrics a few years later, which has led to a small business with hand-dyed fabrics and a bi-monthly fabric club. I studied with Nancy Crow and other international teachers and am a member of SAQA, SDA, the German Patchwork Guild (currently the International Officer for the Guild) and QGBI. I write an English blog and a German blog (and I try to keep them different in topics).

When my son started drawing at the age of 2 ½ I soon realized that his drawings - completely standard for his development, nothing extraordinary - could be turned into inspiration for my work, and I began using his drawings as a starting point for my quilt designs. This led to a series “Play of Lines” which kept me busy for several years; two large quilts of mine from this series were exhibited in the “Color Improvisations” show curated by Nancy Crow.

Play of Lines X

Play of Lines VIII -
this quilt is now on its way to be traveling
with "Abstract and Geometric".

Other series of mine are called Shapes, and, most recently, text messages. Shapes began because I had an exhibition in a UNESCO World Heritage with two other quilters which was the first building designed and built by Walter Gropius, later founder of the famous Bauhaus Art School. So we had decided to use the basic geometric shapes, which figured prominently in Bauhaus teaching, as inspiration for the quilts that should be on display there.

Shapes 10

text messages turned into a series when SAQA issued a call for entries under that title. I had an idea right away, and then realized that I had already been working with text before. And it adds on to my former academic life, when I was a linguist. 

Promised Land 2015? (text messages 9)

I have had several solo exhibitions at international venues and been included in a number of juried traveling international exhibitions.

For the past three years it has been slightly harder to find enough and ample time for quilting as I got involved with voluntary work helping refugees in Germany, and for this past year I have been teaching German as a foreign language to a refugee class as well. This is a very important aspect of my life right now, that has also begun to enter my work. It will be interesting to see how it develops here - apart from how the refugee situation in Germany and Europe will develop in general.