eQuilter Blog

What is it about Paris that makes one want to run out and buy red lipstick? ….
and a hat with a big silk rose pinned to the side? Once you are there you forget about the cliches and become immersed in the stylish soup of Parisian street life.
The city lights glowing in the low-hanging clouds, and the neon signs
reflecting off the dark wet cobblestone streets just put you in a
francophile daze and…
zap! You find yourself wearing a beret!

Well anyway that's what happened to me last week.

On my last night there it was sprinkling just enough to wet the streets,
so that all the illuminated buildings and holiday lights made a
watercolor wash of color shining on the damp stones.
Ah, Paris! I walked the steep winding alleys of the old city, and ended up on Montmartre…
listening to the chest-thumping pipe organ of Sacr?-C?ur,
craning my neck to look at her glimmering gold Byzantine-style mosaics
inside the dome, then bursting out in to the cold damp evening to take
in the view of the misty city and rooftops below.

In the Place du Tertre (the central plaza at the top of the mountain), the artists still set up their easels to create portraits
of the visiting tourists.
The tinkling of piano keys and the smooth voice of a chanson singer come
floating out of a restaurant on the plaza.
An accordion player occupies one entrance, and a scruffy band of singing
young men have set up with their guitars across the plaza.
Shops full of art and souvenirs crowd the alleys that quickly twist and
fall away on steep cobbled walkways.
It is no longer the rough artist's district described in the song La Boh?me – but it still has plenty of atmosphere.

In the last year I have traveled to Japan, Thailand, Australia, Ireland, England, Italy, Russia, and Guatemala.
Each country seduces with its colors, its food and textiles, its fragrances and music, and the warm smiles of its people.
It was good to finish the year in France.
I was the hot bread, and Paris was the melting butter.
If you watched the movie about Julia Child – "Julie & Julia" – you know what I mean.

I had a scare on this trip.
I dropped my Nikon! However my camera was checked out at the camera
hospital, tweaked a bit, and pronounced fit for the next trip.
(Tokyo Quilt Festival in 3 weeks) Whew!

*****

QUILT RELIEF UPDATE:

YES! We are still distributing quilts to victims of Hurricane Sandy!
Tens of thousands of people lost homes and possessions, and your
donated quilts mean SO much to these folks.
We had about 300 quilts distributed last week, and another 300 are being
distributed later this week.
As fast as you can send them to the Timeless Treasures warehouse in New
Jersey, we are getting them out to the communities who have lost so
much.

As you may know, the mayor of Newtown Connecticut asked that no more gifts be sent to their town.
They were inundated with tons of toys, pillowcases, books, etc.
but as I've said before, this is not what this community needs.
We have a longterm project for *group* memorial quilts for the community.
I am working with my contacts there on this *longterm* project.
I am putting out a call to groups – for individuals to make blocks that
will then go into group memorial quilts for the Sandy Hook Elementary
School families.

If you are itching to sew for someone in need, please stay focused on the Hurricane Sandy relief effort, while we organize the longterm Sandy Hook memorial quilt project.
It gets a little confusing because both of these have "Sandy" in the name.

Watch for my latest France photos on my Flickr photo page and my Instagram account.

As you read this I am flying home from my week in France, and a wonderful excursion among some of the textile wonders of the world!

One thing I really love about Paris is that you always find costume exhibits alongside the art exhibits.

Currently at the Museum of Decorative Arts, you will find the Fashioning Fashion exhibit, showing the history of fashion from 1700 – 1915. (This is a museum in the Louvre complex)

At the D'Orsay Museum there is currently an exhibit of costumes seen in Impressionist paintings.

I also saw opera and ballet costumes on display at the Garnier Opera House – although apparently I just missed an exhibit of Christian Lacroix costumes there.

Last weekend I had a wonderful time at the Lyon textile museum, viewing several centuries of silk weaving and textile history.

One thing's for certain – the love of fabric and embellishment has been going on for a long time! It doesn't take a fabric-lover to gasp in amazement at the most exquisitely-rendered textile masterpieces of the last few centuries.

I got several comments about the midweek Creative Nudge, regarding plagiarizing vs. inspiration. When I came into the quilt industry from the fashion industry, and from a background in fine arts, I was surprised at how proprietary quilters are about their work. In the art world, and the fashion world, it is a given that everything has been done before, but what's new is how things are recombined and recreated. I was shocked when I heard a story about someone copyrighting a historic quilt block, and suing others who then tried to work with this historic block.

The more you study art, the more you see how artists inspire each other through the ages. You can be inspired by a neighbor's work from last week, or you can be inspired by a French artist 200 years ago. There is nothing wrong with being inspired by another's work. In fact most of us are unconsciously inspired by generations of viewing art and quilts and fashion and design… and after washing around in the brain for awhile we spit it out in a new combination that looks new to us…and everyone else.

Study art history, and you'll read about the lineage of artistic inspiration. Every artist had a mentor who influenced the student's work, and even when the great genius artists created a new style, they were inspired by other artists or art forms. We keep inventing new ways of seeing, new ways of expressing, and new ways of naming our art. In this age where we are bombarded by more images and more information than ever before in the history of mankind, we set ourselves apart by creating a new way of combining colors and rendering motifs. In a time when recycled art is a huge trend, those of us clinging to rigid ideas about copyright should consider the magnitude of all-that-is in the mega-reality of digital images stored in the giant database of the internet. Creative people don't copy – they re-imagine an inspiration and make it their own.