Getting Ready for Retreat

 

As Germany is inching towards its earlier-than-normally-scheduled Federal Election on Sunday, after the coalition government broke up early November, I am preparing for a weekend of a quilting retreat at my twice-a-year workshop site at Petersberg Rural Catholic Community College. 

 

It will be good to just withdraw from the world and ignore the last days before the election proper. I must say I think I have never been as scared before a national election in my country before. I was, internationally speaking, rather skeptical if not scared before Britain’s Brexit vote, and twice in the US, and all three were worse than expected, accordingly, this experience doesn’t give me a whole lot of hope. Especially since it seems that forecasts lately are rather far from indicating the real outcome. I have cast my vote by ‘mail’ (carrying it across the street and putting the envelope in the town hall’s mail box). And now it remains to be seen whether Germany’s democratic foundation is strong enough to avoid another slipping into Weimar Republic Chaos and pre-fascist conditions. Watching the happenings with the newest US administration – is it still an administration or what is it, really? – is so scary. Why on earth did the Americans let this happen? How on earth can it be that the EU is not at all prepared for this worst case scenario? Where are we heading?

Usually I am not somebody who withdraws, and I do hope I will have enough strength again soon to be politically active in case it is needed. But last year’s private events have taken a severe toll on my strength and I am only now feeling as if there might be a bit of an upwind under my personal wings. Don’t feel safe enough yet to trust it or to talk about it publicly.

Personally I am packing a few projects that need to get finished, should I have personal sewing time while the workshop participants are busy, such as bindings, sleeves to put on, a top or two to be sewn together. Too much, really, because I always pack too many things and usually don't have enough time to finish them all.

 

Due to the move last fall I have a hard time finding stuff that I need for the class, I may be winging a bit of the teaching. But I am very glad I am going to a safe space right now, even if it won’t be for long, and reality will hit in terms of the election results late Sunday night.

 

Cold Swimming in Difficult Times

It’s been a little over a year since I started a new chapter in my life by moving to the city of Ratzeburg in northern Germany, 

Ratzeburg, view of the ancient cathedral built in the times of
Henry the Lion

 

part-time. I started a job, working full-time for two weeks, going back south to be with my family, (now only my husband, the son has since moved to Amsterdam to study at the unversity there).

It started off great, I felt a lot of enthusiasm and thought everything would be good. Unfortunately, the job situation turned out rather more difficult than I had expected and is still not quite settled. (But as of today, it looks as if it will be more settled starting March 1.) Add to that the various crises of last year in the family realm that I don’t want to talk about here (anymore), and one could say that I would have been prone to fall sick due to exhaustion after overburdening. However, one, if not the major reason why I moved to Ratzeburg, of all places, is the fact that it is situated in a lake region. 

 

Family history and childhood memories had long ago anchored a deep yearning inside my soul that I wanted to live in a lake area, with easy access to water. It might well have been a Bavarian lake, but those somehow were always out of reach (and realty prices there are extremely high) and my husband did not want to apply for a position there. So when we had agreed that we would want to move to Ratzeburg for his retirement, a combination of circumstances led to my decision that I would go ahead and start putting down roots.

It was clear to me that I wanted to go swimming in the lake a lot, and I also knew that I wanted to swim (or rather: dip, in the winter) all year round. But I had heard that it is the ‘proper’ way to start in the summer and just keep going, never stopping when the water gets colder, to make adjusting easier. After I had moved in January, I spent the first two weeks getting acclimatized by wading in the water for a few moments, up to my knees, or a bit deeper, depending on the outside temperature and my clothing equipment. At that point I thought I would start going in for good in March, assuming the water would get slightly warmer then. In February, when I returned for my second round of work, I went to the lake on the evening when I arrived and waded – and when I went home, I thought “what the …, I can start immersing now.” And I did the next day.

 

Yes, it did feel cold. Especially cold around the neck, I thought. Yes, at first it did take a few breathing exercises when doing my swim strokes to avoid hyperventilating. And yes, one does feel numb when coming out of the water, and it takes a while, sometimes even a rather long while, to get fully warm again. But walking home takes care of that part, at least a bit, a kettle of tea upon returning home helps to warm up from inside, and the feeling of elation and completeness that occurs every single time is just unbelievable. Indescribable. Unsurpassable. Inexplicable. After three times, when I still had minor doubts whether I was being insane, I was completely hooked.

 

Going for a swim every single day that I am in Ratzeburg has grounded me securely, given me a structure and, I think, has kept me sane throughout the last year. And healthy – I have not had a single cold during the last year. So I want to sing a little praise for my lake. Very few people understand what I am doing, but I have found a good friend who does the same, and sometimes we go together. But most people also don’t understand that I came up with the idea of living temporarily apart from my husband and commuting back and forth with a now six-hour drive. I just must embrace my otherness - perhaps I would even qualify for being an ‘audacious woman’ in the meaning of Anne Boyd who writes a substack with that title, although I didn’t pack up quite as thoroughly as she did?

I have recently joined the rowing club, world famous in rowing circles, where my father used to be a member and train when he was young (and where my parents met many years ago).

 

What remains to be seen is how this move and change of life circumstances can positively affect my creativity, which it hasn’t done so far. But now, with a new start ahead of me, I hope it will eventually develop. And I will keep going for a swim in the lake every day that I am here.

Critical Appraisal of an Older Sweater

In June of 1991 I traveled to Finland, near Joensuu. My then-partner and I had rented a cottage from friends of his family and spent two weeks on a lake, remote from everything else, with a small sauna on the property and a boat to take out onto the lake. I was studying for my final exams at the university, which at this stage meant that I had a number of novels to read that I would be examined on. For several days I sat out on the lake in the boat reading Charlotte Bronte’s novel ‘Shirley’. I loved the Finnish landscape, the little lake, we had good weather.

On one of the days we went to visit the friends we had rented from, and I remember that the mother of the family talked to us about the historical fact of divided people. It was only one and a half years after the Wall had come down, less than a full year since German reunification, and the topic was very much present those days. She mentioned that Karelia, the region they were living in, was still divided, because part of it is part of Russia. I had no significant knowledge of Finnish history then, apart from the fact that there had been a Russian-Finnish War, and had never thought much about the effects that had on people living there. But we got talking, she had seen me knitting something, she talked about Karelian knitting patterns, and I ended up copying a pattern she claimed was ‘typically Karelian’.

 

On our trip home, when we had a couple of hours to spare, I insisted we go and try to buy some ‘real Finnish yarn’ so I could knit a Karelian sweater. (I assume my then-partner must have thought me a bit out of my mind, but he obliged.) And I did knit that sweater. Which I still have. It hasn’t been worn a whole lot because the yarn turned out to be more itchy than I had realized, and even recent bathing in lanolin hasn’t helped with that a lot. It is a sweater to be worn over a not-too-thin turtleneck, otherwise you’ll be unhappy. 

 

But it fits well. And when I look at it now, I am still pretty pleased with the result. All I had was the hand-drawn repeat of the Karelian pattern. No further instructions, but then that is how I always knit or why I have severe problems when trying to follow a knitting pattern that tells me to cast on 32 stitches and knit 20 rows instead of giving me centimeters for a specific size. I swatch, I measure the body or arm length, I calculate (one of the most useful things I learned in Math – Pythagoras’ Rule of Three!), and then I start knitting. But I never learned how to do a proper design. So I suppose if I had been more educated about these things I might have given some thought to whether the repeats matched nicely on the sides of the raglan lines in the upper part. 

 

It didn’t occur to me then. And I don’t mind. And I am not sure I would be willing to do the maths to avoid that 'problem' if I were to start another sweater with a colourwork pattern without instructions these days.

 

All I want to do is  to get it a bit softer, if possible.

I think I (sort of) hate this quilt.

This past August I was invited to join the ‘Voyage’ International Textile Artists Group and immediately said yes. As with joining the 20 Perspectives, my aim was to boost my creativity, have something to work towards, giving me some kind of anchorage in this terrible year 2024, hoping, it would all turn out for the better.

At first, I had said I would most likely not be able to contribute to the group’s upcoming exhibition at BMO ’25, thinking it would prove to be too much stress to whip out a quilt in the short amount of time I would have once we finished our move. Especially as the topic ‘alchemy’ didn’t exactly cause a flood of ideas that asked to be put into a quilt.

When we started unpacking all our boxes in the new apartment, however, the first thing I put on the design wall was a conglomeration of fabrics with a special meaning, because I had come up with an idea after all. Searching the internet for a definition led me, of course, to Wikipedia, and the German page defines the term ‘alchemy’ as „die Lehre von den Eigenschaften der Stoffe und ihren Reaktionen“, i.e. the doctrine of the characteristics of elements/materials and their reactions with each other. (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemie)

The German noun “Stoffe”, however, also means ‘fabrics’, which gave me a short cut for my interpretation. Fabrics have a relationship and some kind of reaction when they are put next to each other, especially when sewn together, and when special fabrics are joined, the alchemy between them takes off. I decided to pair some of my special fabrics that were all waiting to be used: rust dyed fabric pieces I had brought home from my trip to South Africa, an indigo dyed scarf, the kimono from my collage project with Kathleen Loomis. I discovered that the pattern on the indigo dyed scarf, which I liked in its design but didn’t wear much because it felt too narrow, was off-set a bit when folded in half: the patterns don’t exactly match. Which I really like a lot.

 

The rust-dyed pieces came home with me from South Africa, and I love them for their coloring, intensity of pattern, and, of course, because they remind me of the trip to Krueger Park and the quilt festival at Johannesburg.

 

Alchemy, in my understanding for this quilt, is not only restricted to the interaction of chemical elements, but I am extending it to fabrics, when placed next to each other. Putting it all together felt good, and after a bit of turning and changing I liked to layout, too.

First attempt - but it got turned around.

 

However, as I had noticed before in another context, but completely forgotten, the rusted fabrics from South Africa are so tightly woven that they are VERY difficult to sew, which was the reason why I had not used these particular fabrics up yet. Sewing them was hard for the machine, and quilting over them caused multiple thread breakages, disruptions in the quilting process and unpleasant loops on the backside. I was indeed getting to the point where I could have thrown this piece out of the window!

 

Deciding on a quilting design then proved another challenge. Yet when I started reading former chancellor Angela Merkel’s memoir that was published recently, and read the section on her most famous (or infamous) statement throughout the 16 years of her chancellorship, I thought it would be interesting to add another layer of alchemy. The quote is from 2016, when Germany was facing the massive influx of more than one million Syrians fleeing the civil war in their country, and quite a few other refugees from several other countries. Chancellor Merkel said that Germany had faced so many difficult situations and overcome them, and that we would be able to deal with and overcome this challenge as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDQki0MMFh4

Interestingly enough, her full statement was hardly ever quoted, but reduced to the three-word-phrase ‘we will manage’. Events following this massive influx of refugees had and still have quite an alchemic-like effect on German society, which I myself felt vividly while I was trying to accompany refugees through the maze of German administration, rules and regulations, giving them guidance for everyday life in a country that is rather different from their own. For this quilt on alchemy I decided to put as much of the quote onto the quilt surface as would fit, and except for a few last words, most of it is on there.

 

Yes, I hated the quilting because of the difficulties with the densely woven fabric. No, I don’t think it is one of my strongest quilts. But it is giving a platform for some of my favorite fabrics, and it includes a statement for which I still admire our former chancellor. At this particular moment it is still not clear whether we have indeed managed to deal with the crisis, our current political situation is partly due to that refugee crisis (combined with problems going back to German reunification, and probably even further back). And in the end I don’t really hate this quilt. But it made a good title for this post (which I started some time in December and am only now finding time to finish).

 

Addendum: This quilt will be on display together with the other Voyage quilts in the collection "Alchemy" at the Scottish Quilt Show in Glasgow in March and at the Brno Patchwork Meeting in April.