Presence in Quilts only, Life 1.0, and on entering the status of being a Senior Citizen

Life 1.0, as they now call it, has again taken over and silenced my posting.

 

So many things happening, so much to do, and with the work-life-arrangement that I have now it is a bit more difficult to get to a sewing machine. All my fabrics are down south. And when family obligations (mother, visiting my son in Amsterdam) keep me away from that place, there isn’t much sewing time to be found. 

But visiting Amsterdam was fun and interesting. And annoying. So many tourists (me amongst them, of course). What a beautiful city - I knew that from my first visit approx. 33 years ago - and how terrible for the people who live there to be so flooded with all those tourists.

 

I love my new mug from that city, which my son brought me for my birthday.

Well, I have been knitting, and a sweater is finished. From handspun fiber, spun last year, and the sweater was started this year, so it’s not as if I haven’t done anything.

Trying on the experiment as WIP

 

I have used a trick at the upper end (the sweater is knit top-down,
as is so in vogue right now) that I was really proud of when I started
after having the idea, but it needs a bit of tweaking still, so
I won't say anything about that yet until I have figured it out more thoroughly.

 

I had three quilts hanging in Brno last weekend – the ‘I think I hate this quilt’, which had already been on display at the Glasgow Quilt Show in March, and a small one that I entered in the festival challenge, "A Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose". That one is traveling with the shows collection now.

 

And SAQA's Wide Horizons  exhibition was there, so “Seeing Red” was there, too – again, because I had entered it in the competition there last year. Even though I could not be there in person, at least I was present in quilts. Perhaps next year will offer an opportunity to go there in person again, I hope.

And I have started not only planning

 

but also working on my next contribution to the regular 20 Perspectives challenges. Although a lot of work still needs to be done on this one, and I wonder when I will have time to do just that.

As of this Sunday I have entered the status of being a Senior Citizen. No longer a 5 in the beginning of my age information. A few years ago I had thought I would want to have a special celebration on this occasion, inviting a number of to-me-important-women in my life for a hang-out together in some nice place, making it an all-women gathering. I even set up a special section on my account to which I transferred a regular amount every month. Unfortunately, that financial hideaway had to be raided several times for unexpected expenses and never amounted for enough to even consider any kind of gathering. Add to that the fact that the male two thirds of the family were slightly offended when I once mentioned that I was considering celebrating like that, i.e. not including them in the group. So I celebrated with my son (my husband had to work and could not come), and put off the girls-gathering for a little while, giving the funds a chance to reaccumulate (and telling myself they will not be raided again for anything else). And perhaps I will change the set-up a bit, away from a birthday celebration, so the guys won't be offended at not being included in a birthday celebration, as it won't be one, a few years from now. I will brood about this a little bit more, and we will see what happens.

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.