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 October. It 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...?