Welcome Guest Textile Artist Frauke Schramm

As I mentioned in past posts, taking Kelly Rae Robert's Flying Lessons last year has impacted my life and business in so many ways. One of the benefits of the ecourse was the personal connections made with other creative people and I'd like to share some of these people with my blog readers.

 For today's blog post, I'm thrilled to be welcoming my guest blogger, Frauke Schramm. Frauke is a talented textile artist from Germany who makes beautiful quilts. She's also sharing her hubby's photography in today's post. I'm so happy to have her as my guest. Please be sure to leave a comment to let her know you visited.
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Hi everybody ! I’m Frauke (also known as quilthexle), an emerging textile artist – and I’m sooo honored to be guest posting today on Melanie’s lovely blog! Thank you so much, Melanie!

Melanie and I met via a inspiring, life-changing online course by Kelley Rae Roberts. One wonderful experience we made through this class was connecting with lots of amazing artists from around the world. How else would a textile artist from Southern Germany do a blogpost on a mixed-media artist’s blog from Louisiana?

Only after I graduated in Political and Educational sciences and started working in corporate world, my creative voice started nagging at me with a voice I could not overhear anymore. So – I took a patchwork class. And was hooked – immediately. In 2009 I entered a quilt into a juried show in the US – and it won first prize in the category “cutting edge”.

I was thrilled, happy – and very nervous and unsecure at the same time. My inner voice urged me to do “more” – to live a creative life, with the big goal of doing this textile art thing for a living sometime in the future. Now I’m on this way … taking baby steps, sometimes without any progress, sometimes leaping forward, sometimes I’m a happy big smile, sometimes I feel just miserable about it.  

One important thing I learnt: be prepared to have downtimes, to be desperate, to consider to quit. But these feelings are so important! Because they do tell you something about you, your own journey and what you need. Just a few days I was standing in our dining room, sobbing in the arms of my wonderful husband – the words I uttered were “I don’t know the way!” A bit strange ? yes. It got me thinking … what do you do when you’re lost? You ask for directions! And so I did – right now, I’m getting into contact with a coach. She’ll not know my way – but I hope she can help me to find it ;-)) I have the strong feeling that this was meant to happen, that it is my very own logical next step. So – listen well, and if that inner voice sounds strange, listen even closer … it wants to tell you something ;-))


So, enough about my creative journey and me. For this guest post, I want to look a bit further into living a creative life as a couple (with both still holding “paycheck jobs”). While I’m a textile artist, my husband is a talented hobby photographer. Of course, taking pictures is an important part of my art, too – capturing the everyday inspiration. Sometimes we go on a photographing trip together. The process of being on a photo trip together is a lot of fun for both of us; when we look at the pictures at home, it is always so inspiring to see how the important other one captured the scene we both saw. I’m going to show you some of the pictures from these trips – do you want to join me? I would be delighted !


Recently we had a short period of winter over here in Germany. And here’s a picture of both of us ! Well, at least of our shadows ;-)) to the left is DH, taking a picture, the shorter figure is me.

 Another trip took us to an old furniture fabric that was torn down. We did not see any “do not enter”-signs ;-)) and spent a very inspiring hour in a wet, cold surrounding. This picture by Jens gives you an idea what we were looking at:

The reflections of the partly torn-down roof in the puddles on the floor fascinated me – so I took this picture:

And Jens took a pic of the fire extinguisher and later on edited that pic so the red became the prominent (and only) color.

I took pictures of small details:

This last picture was taken by me – and Jens edited it, so it is a true coproduction:

I hardly ever do a lot of digital editing with my pictures (I do resize them, and sometimes I correct the colors), so it is kind of weird for me to see one of my pictures edited like this. On the other side, when we spoke about this guestpost, it became very clear to me that Jens would not want to have any of his unedited pictures published. To me, that’s an important part of working creatively together: you must respect the way your partner sees his or her art. You don’t need to love it, and you don’t need to praise it when you don’t feel like it, but respect for the creative decisions of your partner is absolutely necessary. But working together or side by side can be truly inspiring, and in the end, you’ll profit both … even if it’s only because you enjoyed a great time together!

Thanks again, Melanie, for having me over for this guest post. Everybody who read it – thank you so much, I do appreciate your time! If you want to see more of Jens’ photography, please visit his flickr account (and if you don’t mind, tell him how you liked his pictures …). And if you would like to visit my corner of the web, you are invited over to quilthexle’s world – the door is always open, and I do my best to keep my blog a happy and welcoming place.

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Thank you, Frauke, for sharing your and your husband's art with us. Thanks everyone for stopping by. Have a great week.