Monday, February 10, 2025

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.

Sunday, February 9, 2025

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.

Saturday, January 11, 2025

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).

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Little Escap(ad)e: Freising, Germany

 ow long it has been since I used this particular category for a blog post! Almost six years, and reasons must have been the epidemic, for one thing, and work. (Although I now think I could have put the excursion to Paris with my son in there, as well, when we went to see l'Arc de Triomphe Wrapped. I didn't think of that then.)

Now we are living in a new place that is still a bit foreign to us, and I felt the need to get out, see a friend, taste a bit of the world. Last Saturday I wanted to go to Freising and took the train. Deutsche Bahn unfortunately being what it is right now, the train I had planned on was canceled. Instead of waiting around in a cold and drafty station for over an hour for the next one, I hopped onto another which brought me to Nuremberg. That had not been on my schedule, but gave me an opportunity to make a small detour when changing trains, as I had been wanting to take a look at the oldest globe model, the Behaim Globe, on display at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum

 


Which I may want to use as inspiration for a quilt I am thinking about. It turned out that the globe’s colors are so faded that the digital presentation, which has been color enhanced, enlarged, and turned into an interactive display, is more attractive to look at than the globe itself. But it gave me enough material to keep contemplating the idea.

As I still had time before I wanted to catch the next train, I tried to make my way towards the world-famous Christkindlmarkt, which I had never been to before. That was not a particularly good idea, on a Saturday, and around midday. I didn’t stay long! Travel to Freising was uneventful, and I was met at the station by my friend Barbara, before we proceeded to her quilt group’s exhibition in the Medieval Prison. (I have written about events in this location before on my German blog and here. )

I loved their exhibition, but somehow didn’t take any photos – perhaps I was too excited about seeing all the group members again after sometimes several years? Barbara and I then spent a leisurely evening at a restaurant, catching up on all that has been going on. It was very good to be talking to a friend and be allowed to vent about the entire year and all its miseries.

Next morning I wanted to – and did – visit the Diözesanmuseum on cathedral hill. However, the one exhibit that I came for specifially, namely the ‘Chapel for Luke and his scribe Lucius the Cyrene’ by James Turrell is only open for rather limited periods during visiting hours.  Which I had not researched properly beforehand – I arrived 20 minutes after the morning period ended and would have had to wait for more than two hours if I wanted to catch the afternoon period. My train home was leaving before that, so I decided to just go with the glimpses of the changes of light colors I could see through the passageway that leads into the installation. 






 

 These photos were taken within only a few minutes, and it gave a small impression of how special it must be to look at these changes when you are in the center of the rooms.

That makes for a good excuse to go to Freising again, soon, with a bit of better planning.

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

Plans.

Have I mentioned before that one of the life lessons I have learned is that plans are there (mostly) to be changed? (I know I have, it’s a purely rhetorical question.)

Another incident has happened recently which has reinforced this lesson. Fortunately, it was only minor, none of the seriously upsetting things as have been happening in this current-hopefully-soon-past year.

The most recent change of plans is related to this year’s continuing challenge of the 20 Perspectives group. Different from our first challenges, we agreed that this year we would each be working three pieces to the same theme, “Conversing with the Earth”. This decision took us a long time, we were considering ‘Conversation with Earth’, but one member thought that this phrase might be copyrighted because a charity of that name exists. Then there were discussions about the article – what difference are we expressing when we insert the article ‘the’ or not?

Once we had decided on the topic, I knew exactly what piece of fabric I wanted to use, and I have written about the first piece in the mini-series before.

Then life took over, I didn’t finish on time for our June group reveal, and I had to start packing up my studio and life for the move. We have unpacked most of our boxes, my new studio has been put into some kind of working mode, even though it is far from well-organized or tidy yet. But I have managed to do a little bit of sewing, including finishing the first piece for Conversing with Earth. (Minus part of the binding at this particular point in time, and the sleeve.)



 

By now I have already missed out on the second reveal in the series, and here is where the change of plans comes in. Originally, I had thought I would make all three pieces with mudcloth. Apart from the piece I used in the first quilt in the series I have a few more pieces that I acquired from a friend and that are similar enough to the piece I had brought home from South Africa. I imagined it would give unity to my three quilts, clearly marking them as a mini series. But when I pinned the fabrics for planning the next piece onto the design wall, their arrangement and collaboration spoke to me so strongly that it became clear within a split second that I could not cut this piece of mudcloth down to the size requirements of the 20 Perspectives series. It is demanding to be something else.


 

There are a few small remnants of the mudcloth, yes, but they haven’t spoken strongly to me yet so that I could come up with a good design idea. There should also be yet another piece around somewhere, in opposite color orientation – a bit of black marks on off-white background, which I remember seeing when I packed up everything. It was going to have been a major feature in my third quilt of the series. However, it hasn’t reappeared from the boxes yet. I could spend hours searching for it by going through my fabric boxes again and again (I have looked into every single one already!) – or I could wait for it to reappear by itself, which, certainly, will only happen after the next and final reveal date.

Hence, a change of plans is called for. I started cutting up a piece of hand-printed fabric I received as a gift from Jan Soules, also a member of 20 Perspectives, last year when we met in California.

Dolores Miller, me, Deb Cashatt, Kris Sazaki, Jan Soules (from left)
at our outing in California last year November



Then I started combining it with another piece that had already been worked on a bit and was included in my mother’s complete fabric selection she handed over to me recently. 


 

Right now it is simmering on the design wall while I had another stint at my work place, I will return to it tomorrow. Curious, what it will develop into.

Monday, November 11, 2024

What a week...

it’s been, that last one. The election in the US, the end of the German coalition government, a football match in Amsterdam gone riot. Excuse me? No comment on either of these happenings from my side. We all have to live with it, and …

I spent a few days at my mother’s place, first celebrating her birthday, then tackling tasks of dealing with the aftermath of my father's passing end of July. There are numerous visits to her place ahead of us in the near future. Donating his clothes to a charity was probably one of the easier ones, although not really easy for either of us. I took some of his shirts, thinking I may use them for comfort quilts. And his hankies, which I already turned into an advent calendar for my son. That now needs to be shipped to Amsterdam when I have found a suitable box ( and no, he did not get caught up in the riots, his campus is far enough away from where things were happening).

Advent calendar for a big boy now out there in the big world...
perphaps more of a comfort for the mother to make it than a necessary gift?


 Now my husband and I are getting acquainted with the situation of being together only the two of us again, an empty nest in a new place. A lot of things still need to find their place and although only a relatively small number of boxes remain to be unpacked (but first we need to get hold of a shelf to be able to put the contents somewhere) and some order has indeed been achieved I would not say that I have developed a real sense of belonging. In fact, I am a bit at a loss when people ask me ‘and have you settled down yet?’ 

We go for walks to explore the surroundings.

The area used to have granite quarries, and porcelain factories,
but most of that has disappeared.


 

I did enjoy the last couple of days of the so-called ‘inversion weather situation’ when I could see in the weather app that almost all of Germany was covered by fog, cold air trapped beneath the higher, warmer layer that we were fortunate to enjoy. 


 

That is a benefit of this place I had not taken into consideration. It used to be that I was the one caught below, under the fog, and that always was a difficult situation for me to bear. 


 

One of the still-not-turned-into-order places is my studio. Smaller than before, fewer shelves, and I just haven’t been here enough to work myself through it all and establish a decent system. But I have sewn a bit, even finished a top already. In the summer I was invited to join the international quilt group Voyage, and although I was a bit at a loss for an idea to sew something for the theme ‘Alchemy’, I wanted to make it a point to participate right away. Once the idea had surfaced it all came together quickly and I have already basted it. Let’s see how quilting goes.

A pre-final view of 'Alchemy of Fabrics', using a number of 'special'
fabrics that have either been treated with a special dyeing method
(indigo, or rusting), or have a special geographic origin
(African countries, Japan), or a special emotional connotation (custom
printed fabric with my son's handwriting from a few years ago).


 Another object that needs to be completed is my first piece for 20 Perspective’s current year-long topic which will eventually count three pieces by each of the members. The first one was due in June, and I did not finish on time. The second reveal within the group took place recently, and I haven’t started the second piece yet, although I do have an inkling where the fabrics might be that I want to use. I hope to be back on track for the third reveal date in January.

Sunday, October 20, 2024

(Things are) Moving on

With all the things going on this summer I took a difficult decision late in August and canceled my trip to EPM in Alsace, although I really had been looking forward to it. There were several exhibitions I would have wanted to see, people I would have loved to meet personally, and it was the first time that the EQA exhibition was opening there, even being shown there.  Life then threw another unpleasant thing in my way, and I also had to cancel the workshop I would have taught at my beloved Petersberg. Fortunately, a long-time participant and friend agreed to act as substitute group leader and the workshop took place without me. The group is well established and many of them are so advanced in their patchwork proficiency that they don’t really need me as a ‘teacher’ anymore, and they could easily handle the newcomers. Keeping my fingers crossed that now, finally, things will begin to smooth down and the next time this workshop will be just a weekend as usual without any emergencies and unpleasant surprises or cancellations.

‘On the side’ of all this my husband and I packed up our belongings and house where we had lived for 19 years and 2 months. Our son had already left for Amsterdam in August, and it was our job to sort through too many items and stuff and books and and and… The movers arrived on a Monday and by late Wednesday morning every box and our furniture was on board. A last and final (14th!) visit to the recycling station after the moving van took off, and then we followed the moving truck, spent a night on mattresses on the floor in the new apartment, before the movers joined us again to unpack on Thursday and Friday. Ever since then we have been working away at boxes. Most, but not all, have by now been unpacked.


 

It took a while before the kettle reappeared and we could make a decent pot of tea. And we were searching for the box with contents of the fridge for several days which somehow had disappeared. When we finally found it – out on the balcony, covered with a plastic sheet to protect it from the rain – the cheese was still edible as it had been a few cool days (although we merely grated it onto a veggie-dish baked in the oven.)

Other things have re-appeared, too.


Project for 20 Perspectives, already way overdue,
and not finished yet.


 

My sewing room is smaller than in the former house, and because the whole apartment is smaller than the house we need to readjust even further.


 First job was to make curtains for my son’s room. Rather idiosyncratic, and certainly not capable of winning a design award, but they do keep the early morning light out when he wants to sleep in a little bit.

And I have put something on my design wall, although it hasn’t progressed far yet.


 

I had a chance to take another look at my Sweater Somewhat Slanted, which keeps changing as it grows. 


 

This time the change was due to the need to re-dedicate the blue handspuns in the bag to enlarge the result of my Tour de Fleece 2024 effort, which had been to spin ‘all my blues’. That ended up with a good amount of 3-plied yarn, but not enough for a complete project. The slanted sweater, however, is so versatile in color placement, it doesn’t really matter what color goes into the remaining length of sleeve 1 and then sleeve 2. 

Still debating how I will fare with the neckline. Not sure yet...

 

And I had the immense joy of meeting up with Kathy (i.e. Kathleen Loomis), who had three hours off the boat on a river cruise in Bamberg, which is now relativle close to where we live. We had a lovely couple of hours in a café, catching up and chatting about what’s been happening in our respective lives. We agreed that it had been too long since we saw each other in person, and that it really was too short a visit, but better than nothing. Hopefully it won’t be quite as long before we get a chance to meet the next time!