Shipping goods is a risky affair, be it canned soup or beautiful artwork. It has been so when merchants in earlier times sent their ships to the Far East and it is so with a container en route filled with a family’s removal goods, and it is so with a parcel being send with modern postal services.

Many things can go wrong. A cargo aircraft can crash, a container can be washed overboard in a fierce storm at sea, a parcel can go astray and end up in another continent and never find its way back – or everything can go fine and the parcel arriving as planned, but the goods inside are damaged. What about that?

Now, that happened this week. Three meticulously wrapped and packed quilts returning back from exhibition, one of them being singled out for inspection in custom services, wrapping opened, goods checked, wrapping sealed again with the custom services tape. Unpacking and checking for damage, as I always do (yes I’m the packer and un-packer) I was impressed by how thoroughly the quilts were wrapped when leaving the exhibition, paper layered throughout and all that. I did not notice what Inge noticed a week later when ironing them for a photo session. She saw that the one quilt singled out for inspection had suffered a two centimetres slit in its surface. Can it be repaired? No, not really, not without leaving a scar with the technique we use. It had been different with a pieced quilt, because that would allow replacement of a damaged piece of fabric.

Did we go ballistic? No. It is a risk of the trade and there is only so much one can do to prevent damage. When shipping we usually select the fastest traceable way available and unorthodoxly we fold the quilts so that the back is on the outside of the folds. Thereby the shipment will not rest unnecessarily long on shelves in transit warehouses and a potential cut by a knife while unpacking will hit the back of the quilt.

Do we want to sue the customs services? No. We suppose the damage happened there, but it will be very hard to prove that it was one of their knives that did the cut, and the shipping box was disposed of immediately after my first inspection (it was big). So, what do we do? Well, the first thought was to trash it. The second thought was to keep it for the case that we one fine day would want to stage a hat-trick exhibition of Inge’s three consecutive top winners in the prestigious Quilt Nihon Exhibition in Japan. For this purpose a cut in one of them would be insignificant. So, we keep it exactly for this purpose.

But, as the old saying goes, there’s a silver lining to every cloud. This week we learned that our composition with 3 dragon flies “Spectator” had been awarded a 1^st place in the AQS show in Paducah.

And the morale of this week’s events can be expressed through another old saying: nothing venture, nothing win!

In last week’s blog I promised myself that next time I got the opportunity to spend a little more time near the flower fields in Holland, I would seize it. Towards the end of last week I happened to be in the region again and despite long days with late meetings I did create that opportunity by getting early out of bed one morning and making a detour via the flower fields on my way to another series of meetings.

It happened to be a beautiful morning on one of these lucky days where the sun is allowed to shine on this flat land. It came in from a low angle on the eastern sky and provided interesting backdrops for the flowers when backlighting greenhouses. The detour took me to fields with hyacinths, and nothing but hyacinths and tens of thousands of them – but where I was, only in two colours: pink and violet, interleaved with stripes of green.

The crisp morning light beaming in on the flowers from a low angle assured contrasts in the details through the extremes of lights and darks, so it was really interesting to get down close to the rows of flowers and see how their intricate structures were sculpted by light and shadows.

It was not before the afternoon of the next day that I realised the missing component in this lovely morning scenario. It was when I got outside the congress centre and crossed the parking lot to take the car to the airport that this component revealed itself. It was the scent of the hyacinths!

What I missed the previous cold morning imposed itself in an overwhelming manner this mild afternoon, and I needed not look around to recall that the congress centre was literally placed amidst flower fields.

When heading on to the airport I noted the stripe-pieced landscape in reds, yellows, whites and blues and thought that whereas it would be relatively straight forward to interpret this visual experience in some form or another, it would be much harder in a piece of artwork to interpret the impact of the scent of more than a hundred thousand flowers – or of only one flower for that sake.

“What would that take?” I wondered. I still have not found an answer.

Over the years I have often been on business trips to the tulip region of The Netherlands, so the fact that they produce onions for world wide distribution of Dutch hybrids of tulips I tend to forget. How can you, one could ask, since this region north of The Hague in every way is featured by this floral industry.

Well, I guess the reason is that it has become a habit to drive the stretch from the airport and down there. It is very flat indeed, the land, the commonly applied architecture appears very uninspiring, and often the weather in this coastal region is a mixed experience.

But then, sometimes in March or April, all the underlying features of the region sing out – and do it loudly! The tulips, daffodils and many other types of flowers start to bloom and soon the fields are coloured vividly and intensely. Entire fields in scarlet, in blue, in yellow and some in orange! And since the land is so flat one merely sees the blooming fields as stripes in the landscape.

So, you can easily imagine that this phenomenon catches my attention when passing through on a lucky day, where the weather allows the sun to bathe these flower fields in light and amplify their colour impact tenfold. This week I had such lucky day and despite I was heading for the airport to fly back to Paris I felt I had to get out and shoot at least a few images.

I found places in the roadside to park for a moment or two, but soon I realised that I would only return home with a touch of what it could have been if I weren’t in a rush. I imagined the photo ops I would have if I could approach the fields and get down in level with the flowers to take close-ups, or seek out good vantage points from where this stripe-pieced corner of The Netherlands really would come to its right in a good composition.

Next time I have such lucky day up there I will try to give myself opportunities to better catch this visual impact the blooming flower fields have. I promise myself that.

…and in the meantime I can speculate about how the afterimage effect makes the world look like for a farmer when he goes home after 8 hours work in a field of bright yellow flowers. Is it rendered in variations of lavender and periwinkle?

When looking down in this square Teflon-covered baking tin in which the bread is both kneaded and baked I consider it a canvas or the foundation of an art quilt. I then look at the 7 different types of flour to the right of the tin and consider it my palette. The dried herbs and nuts and seeds to the left of the tin I consider my brush strokes.

Using water and virgin olive oil as medium I then start my 5 minutes of uncomplicated free-flowing creativity of adding ingredients – just as I feel like. The only constraints really are the relation between water and flour, and the volume of the baking tin – all very similar with the constraints of a painting.

Finally I put the baking tin back in the bread machine, select programme 3 and switch it on. Somewhat later the good smell of kneaded dough spreads and finally that of newly baked bread fills the apartment. Ahhhh, delicious!

The bread is not baked according to a theme of a competitive exhibition or supposed to fit into a collection of works for a solo-exhibition. It is baked to be eaten, to be consumed within a day or two. So baking my own bread now as a middle-aged adult has similarities with me building a castle of sand on the beach when I was a boy. After a day or two both are gone, but their creations were intuitive and uncomplicated and the time spent very relaxing.