News and Weathers

If Michael Enright can say “all the latest news and weathers” on CBC, then I can say it too.  And we’ve had a variety of them lately.

But first, the news. Way back in September, you perhaps remember, I went to a retreat in Lac Le Jeune, near Kamloops, to hang out with other artists working in fibre.  We were about forty at the retreat, out of about a hundred who together make up the Fibre Arts Network.  We come from all across western Canada, from Vancouver Island to Manitoba and even up to the Yukon.  I’d met a lot of the people attending the retreat (okay, women, since we are all women) at the SAQA conference in West Kelowna in May, and so I was looking forward to re-kindling and strengthening friendships with those women and making new friends too.  Which happened in spades.  

But the other thing that happened is that each one of us, with I think only two exceptions, stood up and presented to the group, talking about whatever we pleased, showing new work or describing classes we’d taken or showing pics from travel adventures.  Some brought their work with them; others used digital presentations for the visuals.  Because I travelled to the retreat by car, I was able to take lots of quilts with me to show.  It was nerve-wracking and exciting and daunting to stand up in front of these women, many of them big names in the fibre art and art quilting worlds, and show my stuff.  When I was about halfway through, I had to stop and gulp a lot of air because I was hyperventilating with anxiety, but I made it through.  And what a great response I got, so generous, so enthusiastic.  And Jaynie Himsl made it a point to come up to me and show me what she’d written in her notebook, which was that it was time I submitted my work to the Canadian Quilting Association’s National Juried Show.

“Okay,” I thought.  “I will.”  And I did.  And at the end of last month, I got my results.  I entered four quilts.  One of them, I thought, had a shot at being accepted.  That one didn’t get in.  

But the other three DID!!!!  Three quilts in the CQA National Juried Show!  Wow.  I have no idea whether you understand what a big deal this show is, but believe me, it’s a big deal.  I’ve been aware of the show for a long time, attended once, and have catalogues from two of the shows, and it’s been a long-held dream of mine to get in.  I didn’t think my work was good enough.  I was too intimidated to try.  The photography was too daunting to attempt.  But thanks to my FAN buddies and my marketing manager (aka my dear husband) I finally applied and I got in.  Have I mentioned that I GOT IN?  What a thrill.

Here are the quilts that were juried in.  You’ve seen them before, but I’ve had at least one request for a reminder, so here you go.  First off, “Sunlit Flowerbed."

And here’s a detail of the stitching, since the application to the CQA requires a detail photo.

Next up, “Through the Garden Fence."

And the detail.

And finally, “Vertigo,” which I featured in my last post.

And the detail.

The one that didn’t get in?  That would be “Raven."

Poor old Raven.  However, this one was accepted into a show called “Wild Life” at Gallery Vertigo in Vernon, a show that specifically solicited fibre art, which is pretty unusual and exciting.  I noticed today, however, that the acting director, Brigitte Red, is a member of SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates), so perhaps it’s not surprising that she favours fibre art.  I’m really pleased that this little quilt, which is one of my favourites, will be seen by everyone who visits that show.  If you’re interested and in the neighbourhood, the show opened on March 9 and runs to the end of the month.

So I’ve gone from only ever having had one quilt entered into a show (other than the annual regional show at the Grand Forks art gallery, where they display everything submitted) to having four quilts accepted into shows, all in the space of a week or two.  I feel totally different, as if I’ve somehow become a real artist, thanks to this recognition from my peers.  And my dh has been bouncing around the house with a big smile on his face (he was entirely responsible for my submitting “Raven” to the Gallery Vertigo show; I hadn’t even read the call for entry but he saw it over my shoulder as I had it up on the computer and insisted that I enter).

And if it hadn’t been for him, none of the CQA submissions would have happened either.  The problem was that the three quilts that were accepted are all large, and I had no suitable photos to submit.  The CQA is very clear about its requirements for quilt photos:  even light, with the quilt displayed on a neutral, preferably white, background, the shot taken straight on without distortion.  We have no walls in the house or in the studio that are big enough for these quilts to hang on and lighting is always a problem.  I thought I was hooped.  The side of dh’s shop?  Nope, I tried that and the overhang makes a shadow at the top of a quilt.  Finally, I hit on the idea of the big doors on the front of the shop.  We tacked up a sheet and then tacked the quilts on top, one at a time.  I felt like a vandal, hammering tacks into my quilts, but nails would have been worse and pins don’t penetrate plywood.  So tacks it was.  Oh, what a hassle, moving the stepladder hither and yon, shifting the camera tripod from place to place trying to get the height and orientation right.  In the end, for the big quilts, we had to put the camera tripod into a wheelbarrow to get the height needed.  The snow in the driveway didn’t help; neither did the fact that it was freezing cold both days we did this.  We had to do it twice because I waited until too late in the day the first time, and all the shots were underexposed; even a little fiddling in the photo editing program couldn’t save them.

You can see how cold it was, what with my most unflattering hat and fleece pullover, and Soop’s huddled posture.  Such dedicated support staff.

So there’s the news part of this post.  Now for the weather.

In a word, snow.

 

We’ve had snow on the ground since late November.  January was so mild that we thought perhaps we were entirely done with winter.  But starting in the first week of February and continuing right through until last week, snow fell, snow on snow.  This last snow storm was pretty spectacular just because of the enormous size of the snowflakes.  They weren’t snowflakes; they were snow gobbets.

I took these photos in the dim of early twilight, and they remind me of that great bit in Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” where he talks about how the snow seems to well up from the ground, not just fall from the sky:

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards."

What a genius Thomas was.

The snow coming off the house roof and the studio roof has met up with the snow already on the ground.  The studio woodshed is the first one below; the second is the porch roof on the house.

This was the view out the kitchen window the weekend before last, with the snow from the roof piled up much higher than the window ledges.

And this is what the east and west sides of the house looked like from outside.  In the pic below, I’ve already started shovelling.  It occurred to me that once all of this snow started to melt, the house might suffer.  I was worried about water seeping into the cellar.  Dh was worried about water seeping into the walls since the snow was piled up well above the top of the foundation.  He, my hero, took over from me and dug out both sides of the house, throwing all that snow farther away so that there is now bare ground for a couple of feet along the foundations.

We have had some problems, despite our best efforts, with the effects of all this heavy snow, but I’ll save that for my next post.  In the meantime, just consider how difficult life is at the moment for someone with short legs.

Poor Sass had a very tough time getting around until we got her favourite places plowed and shovelled.  Here she’s trying to get from the driveway to the house.  Even Django was swimming rather than running through the snow.  Epic!  See the snowflake obscuring the left post of the gazebo?  Monster flake.  

In my next post, I'll describe some other things I've been up to, and give you some pics showing more epic weather consequences.

 

Comments

[Mahina Rose]

congratulations Anne! I will certainly go see raven next time I make it to the city. I think you might have beat us in the accumulation department. We just lost the roof on the old homestead today. It's a little heartbreaking, but at least no one got hurt. Mahina

[Anne at Shintangle Studio]

Thanks, Mahina! So sorry about your homestead roof. I'll show you what we lost in my next post. And our neighbours down the road had their garage roof cave in last week: they've only been in that property a few months, so I feel badly for them. I'd love it if you'd drop in and visit my raven in Vernon. My dh and I are hoping to get over there before the show ends to see everyone's work.

[Jaynie Himsl]

I have such a big smile on my face reading about your experience entering the NJS and getting in. Reliving the feeling of being accepted into that show for the first time is just as you describe- the excitement, the nod of acceptance from a jury of peers, the frustration of meeting entry requirements.

Now that you've got over that hurdle, SAQA has several calls for entry. Looking forward to seeing you and your quilts in Van. Jaynie

[Anne at Shintangle Studio]

Thanks for your big smile while reading my post: it really is a super feeling, this moment in my art quilting career. I hope it gives you satisfaction to know you were the impetus for my submissions to the NJS. I will have a look at the SAQA calls for entry, though SAQA seems like another big step up in the art quilting world. Still, why not? It makes me happy to know that your map leaf quilt is touring the world because you entered it in a SAQA call for entries.