My visit to Karlsruhe

After St Ives and my trip to Cornwall (which I will put more pictures about! some time soon...), I went to Germany to Nadelwelt Karlsruhe, a new needlecraft fair (dominated by quilting), sponsored by the excellent German magazine Patchwork Professional.  I was invited to teach two different workshops there, and it was a fantastic experience.

There were many excellent exhibitions there:  Nancy Crow's Color Improvisations, Quilts from Sweden to Israel, Noriko Endo, Gudrun Heinz's Textile News, and others.  Unfortunately photography was strictly not allowed in the exhibitions!  So I will have to entertain my blog visitors with photographs of Karlsruhe instead.

This is a view from my hotel window.

I could also see the trams passing by - trams and bicycles are the most common form of transport in Karlsruhe, which is a very flat city.

There are a lot of fountains in the streets - it was actually very hot most of the time - the one in this shopping centre was quite extraordinary - water shot out from a hole on one end and crashed on a small contained on the other end, after describing a semicircular path above the rest of the fountain.  It was not continuous but intermittent.  I managed to take this 'stop-time' photo by altering the settings in my camera - the water looks frozen in time, as if it were glass.

There are beautiful Botanical Gardens and parks - I took this photo of the extraordinary knotted tree trunk in one of the parks.

The sculpture below is in the gardens of the Opera House, and it was not green - the green is from the lights that illuminated it.

But the best thing in Karlsruhe, according to my husband, was the beer!  This glass was drunk by him in a garden cafe on a hot sunny day.

More soon!

Alicia