Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Happy New Year 2015


Hope your mailbox will be more easily accessible all year round.

thank you for reading this blog!

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Winter

We’re on vacation. Winter vacation. And it really started being winter the day before we left.
We managed to get where we wanted to be, despite heavy snowfalls and very slow traffic on the autobahn. And now we are enjoying the snow.


We don’t have to go anywhere, the skiing track starts right outside the house where we are staying – and supposedly it will be cleared again later during the day.





And I’m not at all thinking about the many many metres of fabric I could have snow dyed had we stayed at home. I’m just hoping there will be more snow there when we return, and during January, and enjoying what we have here, right now.


Saturday, December 27, 2014

Finally!

A little bit of snow.


Lots of traffic at the bird feeder.





And I will try to set up a first box with snow dyeing tonight. But we are going away for a few days tomorrow - I just hope it will snow some more after we get back!

Monday, December 22, 2014

Death amongst quilts...


When I arrived at the Fagus Werk on Saturday after my long train trip, we were sad to see a little mouse which had expired in one of the sections of the room. We’re not quite sure whether it was struck dead by the beauty of the quilts, or what caused it’s demise... 


In any case, this near confrontation with death while we were taking down our exhibition sobered us up for a little while at least!

Packing up is always quick, and it was easier than I had expected. This is what I would be traveling home with:



And this wrapped up bundle of bubble foil went into a large box and will be shipped to my home address.


At six o’clock, I hopped back onto the train.



And, contrary to all expectations every single train was on time, I made all my connections (thanks to two friendly helpers especially in Nuremberg station, where I had only eight minutes to change platforms) and was home by midnight. 

Saturday, December 20, 2014

on my way

I am currently sitting in the train on my way to Alfeld, where I will take down the exhibition "Inspiration Bauhaus". That made it necessary to get up early - and gave me the pleasure of experiencing the sunrise in Regensburg, at the main station. As can be seen in these reflections.





Monday, December 15, 2014

High Noon

1 - computer class

2 - view from the computer classroom

3 - my workspace during computer class, last day

4 - waiting to be emptied
5 - organic fruit and dairy products

6 - Christmas market in Landshut

7 - Our local solar field on a bright and sunny Sunday in German winter 

8 - yet another bright and sunny day in German winter

9 - after Spanish class
10 - Season's offers

11 - practising what I learned in computer class

12 - finally, I a bit of sunshine!

13 - the result of several hours' work of carding
14 - finishing Christmas presents while sitting in the sunny window seat

15 - newly inserted stability, and order, in my son's book shelves

Thursday, December 11, 2014

It's a workshop! (well, it will be...)

One of the too many things I have been doing during the last few weeks – when I had originally thought I would have a bit of a quieter time after returning from Veldhoven – had started as a “what if...?”-kind-of-question last July.


When Kathy Loomis was visiting, we had talked about the fact that there weren’t really a whole lot of people signed up for her workshop at Nancy Crow’s Barn, and how much fun it would have been if I could have come, because a Master Class there was the place where we first met in person and worked side by side to each other for two weeks. This idea of me going, however, was completely out of the question, not only due to financial reasons. Then we started talking about whether we would ever have the chance again to spend several days in a workshop together, working, enjoying the company of other quilters. And a small idea started to take form – what if Kathy, who was already then planning to come to the Prague Patchwork Meeting in April 2015, for the exhibition of our group International Threads, flew in and out of Munich and spent a few extra days at our place again, and could we organize a workshop with her as a teacher...? Kathy left for her holidays in Italy and then returned home, and for a while it wasn’t quite certain whether my family would move before April, so any serious planning was put on hold.
Then in the end of October a decision was made that we wouldn’t be moving anywhere before March or April, and I started reconsidering that workshop-idea. Wasn’t it too late to start now – definitely too late to get it published in any kind of magazines – how much interest could be generated – would it be possible to get the room where I teach my local patchwork classes for several days in a row during daytime (other activities take place there, so that wasn’t exactly easy)...? For a little while – to be precise: for a whole a week after we knew that we would not be moving – I hesitated. Then I met quilters in Hamburg, talked to them about this idea in a hypothetical manner, and met with a lot of interest from several sides. That’s what spiked my organizer’s instinct – would it be possible to get a full class for Kathy even on short notice?
After I returned from Hamburg, I talked to the person responsible, and I managed to get the room, and Kathy and I agreed on how much each participant should pay. Kathy was generous enough to say “hey, if we have only three people, we will have three days of fun sewing and intensive teaching, never mind the payment.” She supplied me with several e-mail addresses of people who had expressed interest to her directly, should she ever teach a workshop in Europe. And I went through my own list of e-mail addresses.
Just after the middle of November – late on Saturday night - I sent out a mass mailing announcing that Kathy would be teaching her “Fine Line Piecing” here for three days in April. By Sunday morning I had the first sign-up, many people replied and were interested, even two people from England considered coming, and by Wednesday the ten spaces were filled through receipt of down-payment. I had thought that if we received only a few sign-ups I would then go on and post the possibility first on the blog, then on facebood, perhaps the Contemporary Group of the Quilter’s Guild of the British Isles, on the German Guild’s page, one after the other... But it never got to that. In the end the last space was filled through a head-to-head race of receipt of payment on my account. We have a waiting list of four people, currently. If there were a larger room available I suppose we could go bigger, but that is not the case.

I had never thought that I would ever start organizing workshops for other teachers. In fact, I kind of like having people organize workshops for me, that I don’t have to bother about taking care about advertising etc. And I don’t think I will be doing this more often or on any kind of regular frequency. But it was an interesting experience to see the huge interest that could be created – and I am really looking forward to the workshop in April! Which will take place approximately nine months after Kathy and I first talked about it...

Friday, December 5, 2014

finally slowing down...?

Don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote about quiet weeks ahead of me, after I returned from Veldhoven end of OctoberIt has been anything but. And although I am not going to go into detail about all the things that I have been trying to finish or organize, for a while I really did not know whether I would make it until Christmas.
But after Monday’s trial session for the SAQA webinar to be aired this coming Tuesday, a three day computer class for which I commuted to Munich early this week, and, finally, a belated shipping of November’s fabric club collection today, things might slow down a little bit now.
I hope.

The trial session indeed was a high stress factor – I had to prepare a powerpoint presentation which will be shown to the attendants, and I have always avoided doing powerpoint... I wasn’t sure whether I could do a good talk on me as a quilter – whereas I had never had much of a doubt about giving a talk about my linguistic research when I was still doing that. But only after the trial session was finished Monday afternoon, and I felt relaxation settling in, did I realize how much that had been nudging me. Well, the trial went well, I will make a few changes to the presentation, and it should be a lot of fun. If you’re a SAQA member and haven’t signed up yet – perhaps you still can? The two other international artists who will be presenting a talk about their environments and how these influence their work are Barbara Lange and Alicia Merret
We had fun during the trial, and I am sure it is going to be a fun hour.


This photo shows my reflection in the window
right after we finished the trial - I thought I
would show it here as you never get to see
what I look like during the talk itself.

My computer class taught me a lot. First of all, how thankful I can be for living the life I do, without having to commute to Munich every day. There are quite a few people here who do – and it can work fine – but a two-hour commute from door to door every day, taking a seven o’clock train, with a return at night. Doesn’t leave you much time to do anything else. I did learn basic skilly in photoshop, too, which I have been using in a most amateur fashion, not really understanding what I was doing. Now I can get a picture that originally looked like this


to look like this. (The original actually looks more like the real day when the picture was taken, but hey, who cares!)


I can turn myself into a watercolour painting.




Or into a neon sculpture.




And many other things. What I really enjoyed was the class-room atmosphere. I took the class in a computer school for women – women teaching women on the computer. We had a very small class, only four pupils, which also made for a very pleasant learning atmosphere. And although I still don’t consider myself any kind of expert in processing pictures, I can do other things now than I used to. Of course, this will not exactly lead to less time spent on the computer...

But now only the Christmas baking is left as a real stress factor. Or...?

Monday, December 1, 2014

High Noon

16 - at the opening of "Tradition bis Moderne",
the German Quilters' Guild's juried exhibition

17 - making apple sauce, again

18 - playing at Spanish

19 - water lily, for which we still have to find a solution for the winter

20 - coming back from Nordic Walking, we
live just around the corner, behind the church

21 - Rosi's flock of chicken

22 - next year's plans

23 - soccer tournament in the gym

24 - that time of year, again
25 - relatives in Spanish

26 - a desk in desperate need of clearing up

27 - heavenly choir, reflection

28 - baking bread

29 - rehearsal for Sunday's mass

30 - mass, just finished