Luana Rubin

Grin and Bear It

 

I think if my day job doesn't pan out, I may become a portrait photographer. Here is one of my latest subjects. He was kind enough not only to pose, but to give me a smile. A friend of mine had a bear in her back yard last week, and I've been thinking about how creative and sensitive people are so open to the messages that animals and Nature bring to us. When a wild animal crosses my path and looks me in the eye, I feel like it is there to give me a message or an inspiration. In the wintertime bears hibernate - so a bear can bring a message of introspection, intuition and dreams - but in the summertime they are foraging and filling up on all the nutrition they can find - in preparation for the winter. I feel like I've been a Summertime Bear for the last couple years - out there traveling and meeting people and taking lots of beautiful photos - in preparation for my Winter Bear mode which is settling into my studio to clear my head and my creative space - and see what comes. This photo was taken last week, when I had an hour to kill before the Denver Capital Quilt Show. (see last week's Creative Nudge newsletter) I popped over to the zoo which is about 5 minutes from the Capitol, and snapped away. Because it was so hot, most the animals were hiding. I didn't get this shot until the very end of my short visit, and as I pushed the button I knew this would be my " catch of the day". Before I head into my studio, I have two more trips over the next couple weeks. This coming Saturday I'll be at the Long Beach Quilt Festival, and on August 11 I will be at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, UK. I'll be filming the show so I can bring back some of the fun for you late August. Aug 5-6 I'll be in Edinburgh, Scotland at the Edinburgh Summer Arts Festival and Tattoo - checking out the kilts and art and woolens and bagpipes! (and my own Scottish heritage) I hope my bear brings a smile to your face, and perhaps inspires you to forage for some creative nuts and berries!

Hope for the Future

This week everyone at eQuilter is so excited about the arrival of our first "eQuilter Baby" - our buyer Dijana gave birth to baby boy Parker on Thursday night. In all our 12 years, this is the first time anyone on our staff has gone through a pregnancy and delivered while working at eQuilter, so we're all as proud as if we were Parker's aunts and uncles!

This morning I took Sam and Sophie to the hospital to see Dijana and Baby Parker. New Daddy Michael was just glowing, and it was so wonderful to see Dijana so happy. She graciously offered to let me hold Parker, and I think it is the first time I've held a newborn since I had my own babies. You forget how tiny a newborn is...but of course I had to smell his downy soft little head. Sweet!

Sam and Sophie were just entranced, and Sam was honored to hold Parker for a little while. Sophie is planning on babysitting Parker when they are both a little older, so she was anxious to meet him for the first time.

Today was also full of sad news about Norway, and we send our prayers to our friends in the Oslo area. However, despite this sometimes crazy world, every day babies are born around the planet, and those of us lucky enough to have those babies in our life, can hope anew for a peaceful future. Today as we walked through the maternity ward, and saw several parents with their newborns, I had a feeling of optimism...that those young families who express faith in the future by having a baby...will somehow help to change the world for their children's future.

eQuilter continues to express our faith in a better future by donating 2% of sales to charity.

As of this month - July 2011 - eQuilter has raised a total of $900,000 for our various charity recipients.

With your help, for those in need here and around the world, and for the oceans, rainforests, wildlife and environment in general, we raise about $100,000 each year.

So we dedicate this month's landmark of $900K to Baby Parker, and wish him a beautiful future on this big-blue-marble-of-a-spaceship called Earth.

As Carl Sandburg wrote:
"A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on."

You can see photos of Parker on my Facebook page or my photo page. (Yes - with Dijana and Michael's permission of course!)

Creative Nudge - A Group Effort

 

Quilters are an eclectic bunch. They are fiercely independent, and can spend hours alone with needle and thread, creating their own personal vision expressed in color and fabric.

On the other hand we quilters are incredibly social animals! Our quilt festivals bring thousands of patchwork-freaks to gatherings that are a lovefest of people who are cut from the same cloth so to speak. Just about any quilter can walk into a room full of quilters and immediately strike up a conversation and a friendship.

Today I went to a quilt show that was a marvelous expression of both the individual quilter, and the group quilter. The Capitol Quilt Show is a showcase for the talents of Colorado quilters, and is hosted and organized by the Colorado Quilting Council. (CQC) The show runs through August 19, and has 270 beautiful quilts hanging throughout the Colorado Capital Building in downtown Denver.

As I walked through the building, marveling at the way the quilts were hung on 3 levels, I couldn't help but gasp at what a massive group effort this represents....and yet in the end each quilt is a poignant expression of one quilter stitching their own unique ideas. Strong willed individuals with a vision, working together to create something greater than the sum of its parts. We quilters could teach those DC politicians a lesson or two about working together for the greater good!

One of the great things about participating in a group effort like this, is the inspiration of the looming DEADLINE. I know I find it hard to get motivated on a project unless there is a deadline. I mean, really, these days there are always a million other projects and emergencies that can shove a project aside, without the virtual cattle-prod of an exhibit deadline. One reason I like to read quilt magazines is so I can keep up-to-date on show deadlines. There are so many exhibitions going on all around our country, all year long, and indeed all around the world.

International exhibits are drawing more and more entries from overseas, and it just shows how much smaller our world has become. It is very exciting to see quilts from around the world, when I go to the quilt show in Houston in October each year. American quilts are shown enthusiastically at the Tokyo Quilt Festival, just as we love to see the Japanese quilts in Houston.

Urban quilters, rural quilters, fiber artists, traditional patchwork practitioners, machine quilters and hand-quilters...we come together to admire each others' work and dream of our next big project. Then we join with others and put on a group show. It is Utopia! Fortunately today there is more acceptance of the infinite variety of techniques, than there was 20 years ago. Today the "Quilt Police" have less sway over the amount of joy we experience when making a beautiful quilt. Some of the biggest prize-winning quilts have done so because...they broke the rules and created a whole new category of quilts in the process.

It is just a few weeks until I travel to the quilt festival in Birmingham UK. This is the largest quilt festival in Europe, and I am looking forward to viewing and reviewing a smorgasbord of international quilts at the show.

A year from now I'll be leading a tour of quilters to Ireland, and we'll spend a few days at the first Irish Quilt Festival! (in between our tour of the Irish countryside and its history)

Whether quilters gather to view each others' work in the US, Japan, Australia, Europe or South America, we all speak the same language....and we all wish we could peek at the back of the quilts when the white-gloved lady is looking the other way!

Red Badge of Quilting Courage

 

The buzz from the Red & White Quilt Show at New York's Park Avenue Armory in March has not died down. Instead, the show has sparked a wave of inspiration among quilters on the East Coast, and around the country.

Those who attended will breathlessly recount the beauty and drama of the 650 quilts on loan from the collection of Joanna Rose... and those same quilters forlornly complain about the brevity of the exhibit. (6 Days) The American Folk Art Museum and curator Elizabeth Warren put together this exhibit, which seems to have had as much coverage here and abroad, as the Victoria & Albert Quilt exhibit had last year.

Why are quilters so excited about Red and White quilts....several months after the show closed? Well besides the obvious graphic visual impact of this gorgeously curated show, innovatively hung in an iconic space (I used to go to the used book shows there and score antique art and poetry books!) every true quilter gets a little shiver of deliciously dangerous pleasure when they look at a red and white quilt.

Why? Well if you have to ask, you've never thrown a quilt with adjacent red and white patches in the washing machine. Red is infamous for its bleeding (no pun intended!) and fugitive color. For all of you who are dedicated Pre-Washers, who have run red prints and batiks through the washer with Retayne (color fixative) multiple times, only to have them fail the bleeding test (can you spell P-I-N-K- S-O-C-K-S?)....we can only view this exhibit with a mix of dread and voyeuristic pleasure.

Me - I hate to pre-wash. I haven't mixed red and white in a quilt since a washing disaster back in 1991. But I might just have to break down and throw some reds in the washer with a splash of Retayne or a color magnet product. (available at your local grocery store's laundry detergent aisle)

Those Red and White Quilts are just too irresistible.

In the mean time I put together a Red and White print category, and I've added links in this newsletter to our red blenders and red batiks.

You know you want them.
(me too)

Sacred Threads

 

On Sunday I was at the Sacred Threads quilt exhibit in Herndon, VA, near the Washington DC Dulles Airport. eQuilter has sponsored this quilt show for many years, but this was the first time I was able to see it in person.

Sacred Threads features quilts that are about Joy, Inspiration, Spirituality, Healing, Grief, Brotherhood and Peace. The quilts express so much emotion and deep thought that it takes 2 hours to get through the 160+ pieces, which were arranged in groups by theme.

The juried show really ran the gamut - from traditional patchwork to experimental fiber art - and from realistic portraits to abstract textural pieces. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was really pleased to see that all points of view were included.

This show - this project - was introduced to me by Vikki Pignatelli many years ago. Vikki described the show to me, and when she asked me to consider being a sponsor, I had to say yes!

It is obvious that the show is about more than just making pretty quilts. It was an opportunity for the quiltmakers to process and express very intense feelings, and then the viewer was also able to have an experiential interaction with the artist's emotions as the viewer stood in front of each piece.

I spent several hours there Sunday, and enjoyed watching the viewers' reactions, as much as seeing the show!

At the closing of the show, I spoke at their sponsor reception. Quite a few people showed up, including many eQuilter customers! It was great to visit with all of you who came to the show! Jinny Beyer was supposed to speak at the reception as well, but she begged off because of the birth of a grandchild. Well I guess we'll let her off this time... *smile*

July 4th was the final day of the show, but you can experience this show again in two years. If you'd like to send an entry to be considered for the next exhibition, watch the website for a Call for Entries about a year from now!

Here is a quilt from the show (above) called "Passed This Way" - which is inspired by the flowers and colors of the Day of the Dead, and the personal roadside memorials that commemorate someone who has passed away at that place. It is by Candyce Grisham of Washington, MO...in the "Healing" category.

Speaking of Loss and Healing, our 2155 quilts in Japan are going through the final process of clearing the customs paperwork, and our contacts are working to distribute all or most of the quilts at a special event on July 13. We will follow these events closely as they unfold, and report back to you as soon as possible, hopefully with some photos from the distribution.

Our contacts are working with a Buddhist monk who has already been presented with a quilt, and his response was that he couldn't believe the beauty and the quality of the quilts. This has been the response of everyone who has seen these quilts - that the quilts donated were of a very high quality and are obviously a very deep and sincere expression of caring and comfort from the 2000+ quilters who sent their handiwork to strangers on the other side of the world. Bless you!

Just thought I'd share this NASA moment with you all -

As Atlantis lifted off for the last time, I watched it live, then sent a
congratulatory text to Dr Jack Bacon at NASA (an Intl Space Station
manager - NASA Engineers Without Borders contact for us).

He just replied to me that there is a packet of dried pineapple going up on
the shuttle to EWB astronaut Ron Garan who is now on the space station - the pineapple was dried in the EWB village-sized food dryer that eQuilter
funded - it was built and tested in Houston/Johnson Space Center NASA -
being constructed at an orphanage in Rwanda later this month with eQuilter
financial support. (We've also helped to fund a clean water system in Rwanda previous to this)

So there's a little connection from eQuilter on the way to space at this
moment!

Jack and his wife witnessed the launch at NASA and are teary-eyed... me too!

When I go to Houston for the big quilt festival in late October, I have dinner with Jack and Kathy. Last time I got the VIP tour of the Johnson Space Center, then had dinner with all the self-described rocket scientists
of their EWB chapter, and sat next to Ron who will be eating that dried
pineapple later today perhaps! When Jack calls up to Ron on the station, he tells him about our quilt drive for Japan, etc..... so very cool that
eQuilter and my name is mentioned up on the Space Station.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/07/08/space.shuttle/index.html?hpt=hp_c1