Pam Holland Designs and Productions

A day in the life of a Quilt teacher. The preparation.

Ah, a day in the life of a Quilt Teacher in preparation.

Get up at 7.30, breakfast, go to the studio, quilt some samples, lunch, more quilting, relax over dinner.

NO, not so.

Get up at 4.30 and with coffee in hand wander across to the studio in the dark. A possum hisses at the dog and all hell lets loose.

You forgot to put some of the projects away last night because  you were so tired so that has to be done and bang, you trip over Lionels dog bone he hid in the carpet yesterday. The coffee survived. The knee didn't.

You have to tidy before you can begin work and you get distracted with emails and requests on the computer. 60 emails to attend to.

If you don't answer them immediatly they hide in cyber space and you're embarrased when you find them 10 days later.

Don't do your lumosity brain exercises straight away because your score will plummet and you will feel a failure all day.... "Oh no my BPI went down"

You read your blog from last night and realise you made spelling mistakes despite checking and double checking.

Emails answered there is an urgent request dropping in and you have to spend 3/4 of an hour preparing a flyer.

Time for breakfast.

A bit of a break. Watch  the news and the coffee is delicious.

Keith cleans the kitchen because he takes longer to read the paper than I. He also takes my coffee space at the table !!!!!

7.30 back to the studio and can I get to the project on the machine. NO. more emails and requests come in.

Invoices and Banking need to be done. The book packaging and a courier organized.

Then dash up stairs and clean up what Keith left... make the bed, talk to the dogs and put on the washing.

 

Back to the studio and more paperwork. A contract this time. Its 10.00 am and I'm still in my Jamas, I have to hide and slide inside praying the painter upstairs doesn't see me.

Dressed and ready for the day, the dog chewed my shoe lace as I was putting on my sneakers but I managed to get out the door and off to the post office.

Relax honey, drive slowly to your next appointment. Nails and a Pedicure. One can't travel looking tatty. I'm old, I have to work hard at not looking tatty.

I read my Ipad while a young person I don't know plays with my feet in an attempt to make them look nice (for what I ask), Vietnamese music is playing very loudly and I'm tempted to get out my earphones. The young girl is cute but she's a learner and she snipped part of my toe. I'm brave so I just roll my eyes and grit my teeth, sort of smiling. Next the nails and I'm so tired I begin to fall asleep, how embarrassing, but the Vietnamese music reaches a crescendo and jolts me back to reality.

OK, tarting up finished, and with diamonds in the red fingernails, I feel a new woman and now I have to eat and do grocery shopping.

I choose to have a hamburger special at the restaurant next door to the salon.

I felt guilty when this svelte well dressed woman about my age came in I'm tucking into my hamburger and it wasn't  very nice anyway. Now I wonder what she will have, a delicious salad I'm sure. OH joy, she had fish and chips, relieved I enjoyed my hamburger.

I look at the clock in the car and its almost 3.00 pm, "where did the day go"

Back to the studio to take phone calls, work on the book, pick the tomatoes and talk to the magpies... and that's about it. Oh I did do my lumosity Brain training but I stopped because for the first time I didn't like the exercises.

Husband Keith goes to the Quilt Guild meeting (not me I'm not committee) so its left overs for tea, and back to the studio to organize my Indian tour.

Its almost 9.00 pm and here I am wasting time on the computer and I haven't touched a darn machine or looked at a quilt all day.

Shout.!!!

So  I'm going to have a coffee and sit in the TV chair and I know I will fall asleep in a short time.

Its a story with a happy ending.

 

A young man approached me in the main street of our small town recently.

He shook my hand,  'do you know where I'm from' he said.
'I think you might come from Chile' I said recognizing his accent. He was taken back. He was raising funds for UNESCO and wanted me to pay a certain amount each month to help the children of Mali.

He was most insistent that I help them, and so I tried to explain that we pledge assistance to many organizations and  monthly sponsorships for children.

Did he believe me, or should I tried to have convince him, well probably not, but like many others we have a conscience. 

We have so much in our home and I felt like a failure walking away without a pledge.

But the incident made me reflect.

I mentioned Callie in my blog a few weeks ago.

Some of you have wrote and asked me to share her story.

I've written down  many of the experiences we had in the adoption of our children. But I felt sad that I didn't write Callie's down as it was happening.

For a good part of the time, we were going through incredible trauma, it was far too emotional and traumatic to document.

Now 34 years later Cal, here it is.

Ten of our thirteen children were born to other Mothers and in each instance their lives were precarious.

We adopted Joshua in 1975 and immediately applied to adopt again. Its a frustratingly slow process.

Years of waiting.
Years of uncertainty.
Years of interviews and Social Workers who want to know the innermost details of your lives.
Months of tears and anticipation.

Finally for the second time we were approved by the Govt of Australia to have our file sent to Sri Lanka.

We were aware that this was just an interim, the papers would sit  in the Govt Offices of Child Welfare in Colombo for months, maybe years.

Keith and I worked for the aid organization on a voluntary basis and I had been to Sri Lanka several times in the role of sponsorship co-coordinator. I knew all the children we had on file and I developed a friendship with the families. It was an amazing and humbling experience.

I checked on our adoption  file each time I visited there.

Our life was busy, we had 6 children and every day was filled with noise, activities and laughter, but there was the niggling thought that somewhere in Sri Lanka there was a small baby girl who was going to be ours. We knew that she wasn’t living the life we experienced. Would she make it, would she ever become ours?

Some nights I would imagine where she was and what she would look like. Trust me, my imagination was nothing compared to the reality of her situation.

Having waited 3 years with no information we began to lose hope and desperation set in.

We were at a local holiday camp with other adopted parents and an urgent  phone call to a member of the Agency bought us the devastating news that due to corruption in the Govt of Sri Lanka all adoptions would cease. However if we located our own child in the coming few weeks our adoption could go ahead.

I still remember sitting outside under the gum trees by Lake Bonnie amid the heat and flies of our camp site a group of us decided that we would need to leave immediately for Sri Lanka.

Within a day, I left Keith home with 6 children and very emotionally I boarded the plane for Columbo. I traveled with friends of ours,  and we formed a strong bond in our quest.

Our arrival in Sri Lanka was fraught with fear, you normally arrive at 2.00 am and we were whisked in a car with no headlights through crowded streets to our hotel.
There had been fighting between the Tamil Tigers and the Govt troops and no one drove with their lights on.

The next day, the Catholic sponsorship organization we worked for on a voluntary basis informed us that there was a World Health Organization Orphanage that had children with paperwork for adoption some 2 hours to the North.

Right then and there we hired a taxi and left.

Columbo was dirty, dusty and the buses spewed diesel right into the windows of the antique cabs. There were holes in the floor, you could see the road flying by as we traveled. If you had to stop, you were assaulted by crowds of people approaching the windows begging for money or food.
Our arrival at the Orphanage was emotional, would our daughter be here?

I’m not going to name towns or people in this format, but those images are still vivid in my mind.

Columbo is hot, very hot, the room where the babies were kept was stifling. Rows of metal cots with no mattresses stood like yellow drawers on legs.

We walked along the rows and the children stared at us with huge black, blank eyes. A small baby cried urgently and I stopped to pick  her up.

“Thats your baby” they said.

And so she was.

Callie had huge eyes, a mop of black curly hair. Her tummy was distended and you could feel the worms. Her legs and arms were smaller than the width of my fingers and her back was cut and bleeding from laying on a metal cot bed.
She weighed no more than a newborn, but she looked older.
I was to find out that she was around 6 months old and weighed just 6lb.

Callie was abandoned at birth and left on a railway line to be killed by the train. Fortunately someone found her and took her to the hospital.

Against all odds she survived I’m sure she was waiting for me to find her.

One would imagine that this was the happy ending, but the story was only just beginning.

Its far too emotional and detailed to relate in this forum but It will be shared in our book.

All I can say is that I had to stay in Sri Lanka for almost 2 months.

My friends and I stayed in a less than salubrious guest house. We traveled on  a local bus 4 hours each day to visit our babies.

I attended court five times but there was always a stay of decision and finally in desperation with legal guardianship given but no adoption orders I shifted her to the Catholic Orphanage I knew well and I flew home to Keith and the children.

Leaving Callie behind and waiting for the legal  battles to be fought by our Lawyer was devastating and the closest I had ever came to breaking.

I can’t even explain the desperation.

A month passed and no news. Then one day a letter came from the lawyer to “Come and get your baby”
We were driving down the freeway when I opened the letter and Keith almost ran off the road.

He went to Sri Lanka to pick her up.
Now 9 months, Callie weighed 9 lb. and was fit to travel.
Thats also another  story too long to relate here, but I always smile when I think of Keith in the mens toilets in Melbourne trying to bath this little mite in the hand basin.
He laid his jacket on the floor to change her on and used toilet paper as a towel just so she could be beautiful to meet us all at the airport.
He said men came in and out without mentioning a word, just a cursory glance.

At one year old, Callie walked and talked and hasn’t stopped since.

She’s our Princess.

Experiences such as these change the way you look at life.

It changes your perception and it made me less tolerant of minor problems that seemed huge for some.

The 'X' quilt is completed.

The 'X' Quilt is completed.

 

I'll possibly use the pattern in the book but in reality this quilt is a class sample and will be given to son Jamie whose film business is called Extreme Productions.

I want each quilt to be a little quirky and different to the norm. The aim is  to stimulate the imagination of the viewer.

I designed the fabric for  the quilts and it worked a treat. Each small quilt will have its own fabric. Of course the red and white stripe will feature in them all. This is the large stripe fabric, then there is a narrower one for smaller images.

The back of the quilt.

The inspiration for the blue fabric are the sweaters that many of the characters wear. Wavy knitting lines.

So to quilting, this is the second quilt I've made on  the sweet 16 and I'm really happy with the results. I've not done anything fancy, no feathers or fans in my quilt. I'm using 50 weight thread and a size 12 needle.

There's lots of quilting on this piece... almost every 1/8th  of an inch in fact. I want the quilting to enhance the illustration, so the circles on the main piece mirror the swirls on the illustration.

Quilting on the stripe lines on the fabric and extending it  into the main body of the quilt works well too.

Outlining the image in black takes a lot of concentration, and I was uncertain whether I could do it on the sweet 16, but it was quite simple really.

The blue fabric is printed, but I extended the image with pigment dyed images to represent the bottom of the sweater.

The feet were made as a dimensional applique, because I want them to come out over the binding.

And so, the quilt is complete.

As Mr Kaiden aged 2 keeps asking me. "Grandma are you happy"?

Yes, Honey, I'm happy with this.

Lawrence of Arabia.

We've had a lovely weekend.

I was able to concentrate on finishing the 'X'  project and at the same time I had a little free time.

It was a hot weekend. The garden is parched and the air was hot with a north wind so a birthday party round the swimming pool with the Grandies, Uncles and Aunts was just super.

Yesterday. Keith and I attended the screening of the re-digitized movie of Laurence of Arabia. It was 4 hours long. Those blue eyes of Peter O'Toole fringed with dark makeup.... just delicious.

In 2011, Keith and I  traveled to the desert area in Jordan where the movie was shot and  the spectacular photography on the big screen was an absolute  delight.

 

The 'X' is done.

I completed the quilt top today.

Its not the best photo.

The feet are 3 dimensional appliques and will come out over the red and white stripe binding.

The hands and arms are illustrated.

The flags will be at the top now.

Exreme, because this will be Miss Jaya's Quilt and her Dads busines is Extreme Productions.

 

Designing the 'X' treme Quilt.

Gees there are so few words you can use beginning with 'X'

'X' for Xylophone just doesn't cut it.

so this quilt will be for son Jamie who's business is

'X'treme Productions.

'X'treme

This morning I decided to continue the flag theme, so I drew the same flags as I have on the 'x' image and made them a little larger on plain fabric.

They look OK, but a bit flat so a little extra shading will do the trick.

That's better... I used black pigment ink to give the flags dimension.

Then the plan was to fuse the back of the piece and cut them out as an applique piece.

So these little flags will be appliqued on the blue 'sweater' fabric at the bottom of the quilt.

But that's not all!!!!

 

Right now I'm creating the quilts for the Alphabet book but before that I need to make a sample for class. I've been waiting for the fabric I designed to arrive and time is running short so I just have to draw some of the fabric and use  what I have. I don't know if it will work, but I'm going to give it a try.

OK, so I'll begin with 'X' because I had a spare one drawn

As I color, and add a little more detail, the image takes on its own peronality. Why is it holding up the flags....?

To be honest I don't know yet until I've finished the quilt.

I'm auditioning it, and its now at this time of the day the brain has gone into melt down  so I'm putting it aside until tomorrow.

Yet another evacuation.

I took a little time off work yesterday and it was a joy.

I had lunch with friends and then we visited  the Art Gallery of South Australia to see the much anticipated Turner Exhibition.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775 – 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style can be said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Although Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, he is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting.

His work was exhibited when he was still a teenager. His entire life was devoted to his art. Unlike many artists of his era, he was successful throughout his career.

I first saw some of his paintings on my 50th birthday in the Tate in London.

I stood in awe when I looked at the images before me and I went back several times to work out how he captured the light.

Yesterday we had been in the gallery for about 3/4 of an hour and suddenly the alarms went off.

Blaringly loud, they shreaked a warning to get out of the building. We hadn't even got to the exhibition and we had to leave. We could have offered to take some of the paintings out with us for safekeeping.

We sat in the sun outside the gallery amongst groups of other people biding their time with their electronic devices. Within minutes  sirens heralded the arrival of the fire brigade.

Whilst they investigate the presumed fire, friend Kay and I decided a strong coffee would help the situation and we found some interesting mural compositions in the back alley of the gallery as we visited the cafe so all was not lost.

After an hour or so we were allowed back into the gallery and we were priviledged to an amazing exhibition of a large number of Turners paintings.

Turners paint box

Several of his 300 sketchbooks were on display, and one of his paintboxes. It was fascinating.

 

William Turner

The exhibition will be on show in Canberra after the May ending and then return to the Tate. How lucky are we.

Still quilting.

I'm having difficulty with the 'composition' link on my blog.... its really frustrating and takes ages to get a blog published. I think it must be a problem with the workings of Typepad.

I've been up in the wee hours working on the quilting of this piece. I probably have about another 20 hours of quilting to do before the quilt is finished.

I'm going to have a large photographic print made of it similar to the Irish Woman. so that I have a copy after it leaves my studio.

I haven't finished the black on the quilt. So that's all the body parts and some of the quilting....Its fascinating using the sweet 16 because I was able to quilt and applique all the 'green' for instance and then go to the red without the quilt puckering.

Its very different to quilting on an ordinary machine.

A had a small hold up... the lights have gone on the sweet 16 so I need to pull it all apart and take it to the dealer.. Its a jolly nuisance when I'm in the middle of a project. So I've decided to use an external set of lights until it's finished then Keith can take it down when I'm traveling.

I'm now using a size 12 needles and I'm a happy chappy... I love it. Each day I grow in confidence on the machine.

I'm very much swinging in the branches.

Goodness 3 days with out a blog post.

We  had a very busy weekend... and by the end of each day I was just too tired to write.

Thanks to those of you who were worried I'd dropped off the tree. I'm very much swinging in the branches.

The photo below is of my favorite sandals, I wore them once when I was dyeing and I got ink all over them, so I'm covering  up the spots with illustration on my shoes. I don't know if I'll cover them with drawing... It might be a bit much but its fun doing it.

Today I had to catch up with Teacher projects, patterns and kits and it took almost all day. Goodness, I reference and cross reference and sometimes I still make mistakes.

You know, actually, I did write a blog. It was prompted by the fact that our Daughter Callie wanted to do something special for our friends who supported us through our adoption process. I've saved it, maybe I will post it someday.

We had our annual luncheon. The temperature rose to 100 degrees but we have a shaded area at the back of the house and with the aid of a few fans, it was quite pleasant.

Callie and Husband Benny had been preparing for days.

We don't have air-con in the kitchen upstairs and I felt really bad they had to cook in that heat but they did it admirably and everyone loved the food. Keith and I were able to spend time with our friends.. we just had the clean up to do. Keith did most of the dishes bless him.

Uggggg.

The menu was amazing, we really couldn't eat it all.

We have another resident chef at home and so he cooked up the left over scallops, squid and prawns for dinner.

How lucky are we.

So My Gal Cal, thank you.