Summer activities

My son’s summer school holidays have kept me busy after my return from England.

We went to a visit in Legoland. He loved it – and I am glad he did. That way it wasn’t quite that bad. 

Einstein in Lego

The Berlin Reichstag in Lego - on the right hand side,
President Obama is being welcomed by Chancellor Merkel,
with photographers flashing their light bulbs, securitiy agents and everything

Jungle Feeling in Lego

What I liked about that outing was the fact that we left the afternoon before, pitched our tent on a campground not too far away from the park, on a little pond, and got to do some camping together. With a little bit of sunset, and a constant drone of car traffic going by on the autobahn in the distance. 

During that night I had a very vivid dream: I won a very prestigious first prize in a quilt show, with prize money involved and lots of publicity afterwards. Unfortunately, in the dream I never got to see the quilt from the front, so I don’t know what it looked like, nor do I know its name. So not a whole lot of information about how to get that quilt made included in the dream...

I’ve been making apple sauce from some of our apples, and a very good apple strudel. I am getting to be very good at that recipe now, and pretty proud about it. As I did not grow up anywhere near Bavaria, I think it is not really a natural thing that somebody learns how to make those things. (And some typical Bavarian dishes I will never even try...) We’ve also been picking apples at our friend’s house, and last Saturday we went to have them pressed for juice. We ended up with 95 litres of 100% pure apple juice!

The whole family went to watch a second league soccer game of ‘the other Munich’ team, which is the original Munich team, but not the big corporation. They lost. But we got to see a game in the big soccer stadium for a very moderate price.

Motivation beforehand...

We went to Regensburg for a day, including a visit to the “Ostdeutsche Galerie”, a museum that focusses on art from Eastern Europe. We caught the last days of a photo exhibition by six or seven artists titled “Heimat?” – which translates as “Home?” Very interesting, in the various contexts that the word Heimat gets used, especially in Bavarian political discourse, with the amount of refugees around the world (political and economical) and globalization. As I have been living in an area which is not ‘home’ for me for more than nine years, the topic was moving on a personal level, too.

My son turns photographer:
in front of the Ostdeutsche Galerie

Meditating the 'home' qualities of the Danube River?

And yesterday – my husband is sick in bed, so my son and I had to while away the day between the two of us – we went on our ritual of a boat ride on Lake Starnberg. My son had a free ticket because of his good grades, and we enjoyed a lot of sunshine, trying to ignore the fact that many other people were trying to do the same.

All this (and some other activities), of course, has been interfering with finishing those quilts for the exhibition in October. Add to that the fact that I kept changing my mind back and forth about what I was going to do with the big fatlight blue I’ve written about earlier. Eventually I took the leap and got away from the idea that it had to be straight lines. 

Still relatively straight, but with the free motion foot -
and serving as foundation for...

wavy lines, several different layers to follow

Yet another pattern in the outside round

But then again it took longer than I thought it would. However, Saturday evening I completed the last stitches quilting, 

Of course, just a few square inches before the end, it's the end
of the bobbin thread...

and yesterday evening sunk the last threads. Today, hopefully, I will start doing the facings etc. – and then, there are only two more little ones left to do. One of which has been up on my design wall and really won’t take long at all. And I’m hoping that the last one will come off easily as well.