Back in Africa - well, almost.

What kept me sane during those terrible two weeks at school was stitching in the evenings. I did a lot of knitting, and some sewing on projects which I have found out I must not post about anymore before the deadline that I am making them for. And I have been slowly catching up on my temperature quilt which I started in April and immediately fell behind with because so many other things were and are going on. (Until very recently I hadn't even taken any pictures.)

For one thing, in a typical Uta-manner I made it a bit too over-intellectual when I decided to do not only highest and lowest temperature of the day, but, due to the pattern I had set my mind on, the averages of highs and lows of the four days represented in the entire block AND the long-range-averages as well.

It looks good – well, I think it does – and by now I have sort of come into a rhythm and know what I am doing. But it is slow going, I keep getting confused about the averages – and I had not realized before beginning that there would be so much going on in the range of 10 to 14 degrees Celsius. I had to add new fabrics because the ones I had picked were running out, which of course adds to the variety. Finally, today, I have caught up to my first days in South Africa.

(Yes, I know, that is still quite a bit behind, but by far not as much as a week ago!)

Which makes for the title of this post… and I finally read Lyric Kinard’s blog posts about our days in Johannesburg, where she has posted many nice pictures and written about our lovely evenings in the ‘international hut’ on campus.

The group of international quilters who were staying in the same house during the festival became to be friends and we are thinking about preparing an exhibition together, certainly with some quilts that are using some of the fabrics we bought when we were being taken on our textile tour of Johannesburg. For that I have been thinking what I want to do, using a piece of mud cloth I picked up from the remnant bag when we all went wild at Amatuli’s .

I thought I knew where I was heading as I was going to add some red and then stitch some text onto it. 

Then I found this piece of leftover linen from a former jacket of my husband’s (in the picture on the left) and was wondering whether this would be more in line with the quality of weave of the mudcloth than the red linen, which is much finer…and only until I did a bit of digging in the garden today, working on the compost heap, and there surfaced a piece of cloth that seems to have been hidden in that heap for a while. 

I did not put it there on purpose. Honestly! But it might well find its way into something. Perhaps even into the mudcloth piece, it being a special kind of mudcloth itself. I will rinse it and see what it looks like and then decide on how to proceed. Right now I can't even tell how big it is...