Café Leisure - almost

 It has been years since I last used that heading for a post, and it feels like many more years that I have actually done that. Sitting in a café without any pressing matters or stuff going on. Can't even blame it completely on the pandemic, because the last time I used that label was 2017. ok. before I started the nursing course, a lot changed with that already.

So today I went to Landshut to get myself an international driver's license so I will be driving legally in the US when I go to visit in November. The last time I visited the US (and rented a car!) I never even thought about bringing one or needing one, so I guess it was just as well I didn't do any serious speeding. But this time the travel agent told me to get one, so I managed to figure out how to make an appointment online (not extremely straightforward - made me wonder how to people do that if they are elderly and even less computer savvy than I am?) and figured I would spend a bit of time at the café before going to my Spanish lesson later on. But then I realized I needed a plug adaptor, too, because mine seems to have disappeared, and I went to the phone company to clarify my contract and how to deal with it all in the States, and then I thought it was too late to sit down in a café and just lounge. Although I had taken the computer with me to be prepared. So the café visit was canceled. Perhaps next week, between my job interview and the next Spanish lesson? 

The first part of last week was spent at Petersberg and we had three quiet and peaceful and warm and sunny days of sewing. Nobody talked about the news from around the world, nobody talked politics.

I made progress on my piece for the next 20 Perspectives challenge.

It needs to be finished in a week, so I better get going with the quilting, which I did not start there.

I also continued making blocks for a self-trial based on an interview I recently did with Caroline Hadley  @geometriquilt for the next issue of the member magazine for the German Quilt Guild. I love her Sunday Posts of quilt designs and was captured by a very yellow version of her Sunday Sketch #372 a number of weeks ago. Caroline is kind enough to be happy when somebody tries to put her designs into fabric, and I had started pretty soon after the post appeared. But it had not progressed far beyond a few prototype blocks to figure out prolific production, so a chance at actually sitting down and prolifically produce was very welcome indeed.

Of course, by now I have some own ideas I will incorporate into the top, to make it more mine, which will be fun to figure out. And looking at this picture I think the yellows need to turn a bit more yellow still, but perhaps that is due to the unflatterin lighting in this picture.

While at the retreat I saw that Ursels QuiltCabin had just had a shipment of PSS's oval templates arrive in their shop, and because I had been wondering how I could get at those without having to pay the outrageous post-Brexit customs and shipment costs I went ahead and ordered them. Plus...

... a bit of yellow fabric Caroline and I had talked about during our conversation. 

 Probably more expensive than if I had bought it in Houston in 2 1/2weeks, but now at least I won't have to lug it home across the Atlantic. Hope to get some sewing time in tonight!

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.

Temperature Quilt, 2nd attempt

 

For the first week in September I had the house all to myself, and at some point I developed a stage of beginning Blues. Couldn’t go anywhere because of the strike on German trains, my husband and son were away with the car, longish distance biking still not possible due to the wrist, and no other activities in the exercise realm either. It was a bit weird – because during lockdown times I had sometimes thought it might have been slightly easier if I had been in lockdown by myself, now the guys were out of the house and I still wasn’t really content. Of course, it wasn’t lockdown, travel would have been possible in principle, only I was not physically able to go anywhere, nor technically equipped to do something interesting. I didn’t mind being by myself, I can do that very well, but I did mind being scooped up in the house despite without the real possibility to move about.

I figured sitting down with sewing was the most helpful remedy and went upstairs to work on my scrap project, which had already progressed a bit since the former post about it. 

 

There is more to the right, just not shown in the picture.

After just a few minutes, however, I got very itchy because we were finally having a few nice and sunny days and I really wanted to sit outside. I searched (and relatively quickly found) my temperature quilt project, 2^nd attempt. I had started that earlier in the year but put it on hold when I realized how big it was going to be as I had not really calculated what the chosen block size would add up to. It would have been over 7’ in height, and that was just too overwhelmingly large. When I reported my dismay my good friend Kathy had suggested I scale down the block size, which was a wonderful idea but also meant I would have to take apart the entire first month which I had already assembled. Of course, I am glad I had assembled that first month and made it a vital part of the production process, because otherwise I would never have found out until much later that I was facing this serious size problem.

This temperature quilt is a hand sewing project, so sitting outside on the terrace was a perfect surrounding for taking it up again. 

 

I made new templates, which left the quarter circle at the same size but seriously shrunk the background. That meant I could take apart the first month in complete blocks, mark the background fabric smaller and sew it all back together. The work of one afternoon, and I got a few new blocks for the second month done in that sitting as well. 

 

Since then, several more afternoons on the terrace have followed. I take my box, sit in the shade on an umbrella, and stitch the individual blocks, assembling them right away in monthly strips. 

 

Orientation is determined by whether there was a rise or a drop in temperature, and depending on whether the difference is larger in the maximum temperature or the minimum temperature of the day. (Not fretting about it, because, strictly speaking, the four possible orientations don’t cover the entire range of possibilities that can come up.)

In this respect, of course, this temperature is not wildly original, there have already been many that did that. 

 

But I am juxtaposing two years: the past year, when I turned 55, and the year of my birth. The idea had started before I knew that 2020 would be the year of the pandemic and there wouldn’t be a whole lot of variation in terms of days out of town. (During my first attempt at a temperature quilt I had the trip to South Africa in August, which meant it could have been a difference in temperatures. Except for the fact that winter in South Africa is not much different in temperatures, at least maximum temperatures, than summer in Germany. Only the minimum was slightly cooler.) The difficult part in this concoction had been obtaining the data for my year of birth, which took several attempts, even almost led to the abortion of the project. But I managed to obtain those, and then the size hick-up... January 1965 will be followed by January 2020, February 1965 by February 2020, and so on.

Meanwhile, the project is growing. We have had a whole row of nice warm days, nicer and more consistent than most of the summer. While I have been stitching, there have been news that it was the summer with the most rainfall in Bavaria since who knows when, the hottest summer on average in Europe since the beginning of temperature records (except that it doesn’t feel like it for me), and the EU commission is passing a weird trade agreements which endanger the Amazon Forest, it’s been Earth Hour Day, hurricanes are sweeping the Southern US.

Tomato harvest has been pitiful due to the amount of rain we have had...

But sunsets have been very pretty lately.

 This quilt contains a lot of climate related thoughts indeed.