Too many temptations!

There are many things on my plate right now. Perhaps a few too many, to be honest. And yet I feel the lure of temptations over and over again, to start yet another project. It takes a lot of strength and energy to resist these temptations, to say ‘no’ and concentrate on things that need to be finished, or finally get around to making real projects I have been planning for a while already.

No, it is not a good idea to sign up for a 4-meeting online course at weird times due to the person offering the class living in a completely different time zone. (For one thing, I would have to negotiate about my work schedule and make sure I could really attend those sessions.) No, I don’t need another set of rather expensive plastic templates for a difficult pattern, thank you, although I like the pattern that could be made with them. (That decision concerns template set no.3, I did cave in with one ruler that I had sent from the US and paid dearly customs fees for, 

The HuRTy by Latifah Saafir, my newest posession.

Precuttings that I am using instead of sew-on-sew-off squares
right now, which will result in another quilt that sewed itself,
in due time. That's the intention, at least.

 

and another set is being brought to Germany from Australia via personal carrier, my many-years-pen-pal’s daughter who has just arrived here for a year abroad during her university studies and will use the set as incentive for her first trip to a German post office one of these days.)

And yet I have to admit that I did commit for one thing and sort of committed for another. The first one I haven’t started on – it’s the Swiss Guilds “Round Bobbin”, for which I have received the bobbin, and the list of prompts, and even THOUGHT about an idea what to do for the first one, ‘paper’. 

 

The other, ‘sort of committed’ is that I am participating in the German Guild’s Sew-Along 

 

which started recently, with the topic of Sea/Ocean, combined with the Alphabet. I did make a personalized version of the first block, an island. 

I won’t make all blocks suggested, as they seem to be rather appliqué-oriented and I am not much into that technique. However, I am planning to substitute for those I omit by making other ocean-related blocks. I may even make some of the letters, but not sure about that yet. The sew-along is free for anyone to participate – if you are quick. For one week each pattern will be freely available on the Patchworkgilde’s website here. After that the pattern is moved to the members-only-section and you would have to be a member to access it. (Instructions in German.)

I am happy that I could send off ‘Mellowed Yellow’ three weeks ago, as it got juried into the German Guild’s Tri-Annual Show “Tradition bis Moderne”. I had entered two different quilts, and out of the two I prefer that Mellowed Yellow got chosen. The show will open in April in Dinkelsbühl, Germany, where it will be on display throughout and beyond this year’s AGM and Patchworktage. After that it will travel through several German towns for the next two years, and it will be shown at EPM in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines in September. 

Mellowed Yellow, started during Corona lockdown to keep my sanity...

 

One thing on my mind that is not strictly quilt-related is the fact that my ‘baby’ will turn 18 in the beginning of May. He has grown very tall and is going to graduate from High School in June (although I sometimes fear that his chilling attitude is just a little bit too chilling, but…) Of course, in a way that is quilt-related, too. I have been meaning to make him a grown-up quilt for his birthday, to substitute for the little-boy-colors one he himself did the layout for several years ago. I have started cutting the new one,

 

including some fabric I had printed from a picture of a notebook page with his little-boy-handwriting I found amongst some discards along the way. 

But if I do want to present him with at least the finished top I better get to work on this one seriously. No time to give in to temptations of various kinds! How good that I have reduced my work load and will only be working three days a week starting in April.

An eerie little respite...

 

For months on end everything has been closed, no workshops or gatherings or even visits with more than one other person possible. Then it seemed as if numbers were going down, a new regulation for adult education centers was announced (my son was alternately going back to school, too) – and the workshop at my usual retreat place Petersberg, north-east of Munich, scheduled for this past weekend, was happening. Only a third of the people who had originally signed up actually committed to coming under the strict hygienic regulations posed by the administration, but the director nevertheless decided that it would be ‘on’.

At first I had been sceptical whether I wanted this to happen, or did I want to go – it meant a severe cut in revenue, after all, and as I had been expecting it to be canceled I had thought about other things to do for the weekend (i.e. finally get serious about studying for my upcoming exams). But after a number of unpleasant experiences last week I was happy enough to get out when time came around, packed my car, and took off.

 

A bit of dramatic sky on the way there – we have been having rather cold temperatures with April-kind-of-weather. And then we were the only group, eight people, in a house where normally there can be up to eighty people. It felt a bit eerie indeed. Eight small peas in a large pod...

But we were determined to make the best of it. I had posited that we talk about anything expect the Big C thing, and although in a few instances little references happened, everybody in the group was eager to check everybody else. We had a lovely weekend sewing, chatting, trying out stuff. It wasn’t a workshop, because we felt that the others who didn’t come but still somehow belong to the group (it’s a rather consistent pool of participants who regularly come to the gatherings) shouldn’t be left out completely. They actually 'joined' us twice for brief zoom interactions.

I enlisted everybody present to make one example of the block ‘burgoyne surrounded’, which is the topic of the current sew along I am hosting for the German Guild, and we came up with a nice selection of examples. 

 

Iris tried an inversion with two colours.

Gina tried her hand on the smaller version
where the small squares measure 1/2 inch only.

A display of (most of) the examples made by the group
(a portion of the light blue ones in the right upper hand corner
I had already made at home and brought with me, I
would not have been able to make that many, they do take time...)

Some of them I may use for further explorations of the pattern in the next few weeks. For posting on social media we even dared take a photo for which we dropped our masks briefly after having set it all up in an almost socially distanced array.

 

Numbers of infection are on the rise again, and the house may have to close down again perhaps day after tomorrow. So this was a strange little heavenly retreat. But it gave a feeling of almost normal, at least until the moment when we had to leave again Sunday afternoon.