An article has just been published about my work on the Quilt National Artists website here: http://quiltnationalartists.com/journey-landscape-alison-schwabe/.  To compose it I looked back through the 4 works I’ve had selected into Quilt National down the years, and while putting them into their context, the title emerged.  Each has to do with landscape as the surface on which change is recorded, and marks are left.  It took me years to see a link between a landscape and a life.  You can read about it and see the pics of the 4 quilts in chronological order down the page, starting with “Ora Banda”, just a little special because it was my first successful entry.

“Ora Banda”  1992      127cm h x 150cm w

I pieced it before leaving Denver to accompany my husband to South America on a business trip, and did all the hand quilting while in Montevideo and Mendoza, Argentina.   I never look at it without remembering the beautiful plaza in front of our hotel there, and how I sat out in the early autumn sun for a couple of hours every afternoon to quilt during the hours of siesta.  Autumn leaves were falling.  Occasionally people would stop and ask what I was doing and comment – goodness knows what they made of whatever I said, as I knew very little Spanish then!