Täuber steps 'out of the box' for traditional art quilting

by Wanda Combs
Editor

When the Täubers moved to Blacksburg 10 years ago, the family was excited to find their ideal house. For Karin Täuber, the roomy two-story structure with blank walls was an invitation to hang her art – quilted landscapes and other scenes.
Karin, the featured quilter for the Old Church Gallery Quilt Guild’s show this weekend in Floyd, has an international background that serves as the inspiration for her quilting. She grew up near Munich, Germany and started quilting after her family’s move to Boston, Massachusetts. When the family relocated to Oxford, Great Britain, she started teaching for local guilds. Two years later the family moved back to Munich, where Karin founded the Hachinger Quilt Festival, an annual outdoor event with vendors and a large quilt exhibit. Soon after moving to Blacksburg in 1999, Karin founded the now biannual Blue Ridge Quilt Festival, which has grown into a four-day trade show offering classes and traveling exhibits and taking place at the New Blacksburg Middle School in June. That event and other experiences as a leader of area guilds have given her the opportunity to not only quilt and teach, but also to share with the community.
Karin describes herself as a traditional art quilter. In Munich, Karin took art classes, and that instruction in weaving, collage and other techniques provided her with a basic foundation in art and knowledge of how colors come together. In Boston, living in an area known as “the cradle of quilting,” she was drawn to “geometric patterns and designs the fabrics created” and began quilting.
Her first quilts were large, traditional ones, and she made quilts for the children and other family members. Traditional quilting gave her important fundamentals of workmanship, she explained, and she continued to rely on those basics as she expanded her art to a different level. She finishes all of the edges on her art quilts, and those quilts can also be washed. Rather than patterns, the art quilts are original designs of landscapes and other scenes. The quilts are multi-layered and can feature overlays of organza and tulle. Each art quilt is completed using free-motion machine quilting “to enhance the design and beading to add sparkle and increase the dimension of the work,” she explained. Recurring themes in her quilts are flowers, vines, rocks, trees, and grasses. Inspirations often come from her own photographs or from books, calendars and impressionistic artists such as Claude Monet.
Taking on new techniques, Karin said, is very liberating, “like stepping out of the box.”
“A lot of German quilts are abstracts,” she noted. “I like landscapes in nature.”
Sometimes vacations to such places as Fripp Island, SC, provide a design idea. Karin’s “The March of the Loggerhead Turtles” was the result of one. The 26”X56” art quilt features 1 ½ inch long turtles and shows artistic challenges, such as the water coming in irregularly over the sand. It has received several recognitions: first place in art quilts at the Star City Quilt Show in 2009 in Roanoke, Best of Show Art Quilt at the Mountain Comfort Quilt Show in 2008 in Ferrum, and second place at the Old Church Gallery Quilt Guild Challenge 2008 in Floyd.
One of Karin’s favorite quilts took eight years to complete, she explained, as she expanded her skills and knowledge in quilting. “Where I Grew Up…” features the house in which she was raised. Built by her great-grandparents, the house sits near an old water tower in Unterhaching, outside Munich. Her brother and his family now live there. “It is a very unique German house…over 100 years old,” she noted. On the back of the quilt, Karin has included the photograph she used for the paper-pieced scene. Karin gives credit to Stephen Seifert, Newport, VA, who helped her streamline her attempts to design a paper-pieced image from a photograph.
A vase of flowers, a design inspiration, sits on the work table in the upstairs quilting room at her house. Colorful ribbons, prizes won at different quilt contests over the years, fill one wall.
As Karin’s youngest daughter, Judith, gets home from school, she goes to her room to retrieve a favorite quilt from her bed. Judith, and her sister, Lillian, 18, have also learned to quilt and are interested in the art.
Karin’s husband Uwe is a physics professor at Virginia Tech, and it was his work that brought the family to the area.
Karin said she enjoys new experiences in quilting. “I have found that every time I try something different it just sends me off on a new adventure and broadens my abilities. My quilts are an expression of that journey, sometimes carefully planned, organized, colorful, and complicated, and other times, they are just happy accidents.”