Scrap Therapy, instalment 'in viral times'

Sometime in the 90s I witnessed a partial solar eclipse. You were not supposed to look up at the sun, and they didn’t have eclipse glasses then, and I am not even sure many people noticed what was happening. I sneaked a view at the sun through some dark piece of glass, I think, and vividly remember the brief impression of a round shape partically covering over the sun, the excitement about the fact that even at that point of perhaps 60% coverage no really noticeable dent in the feeling of warmth had occurred. Then, in 1999 – in what feels like several millenia ago! - my first total solar eclipse. Although it was a bit cloudy and overcast, I got to see the full extent of totality. Ever since then the word ‚corona‘ had a certain magic for me. I am not an astronomy expert, but I am fascinated by that – how such a comparably small lunar shape can cover up the sun from our perspective, and that it happens at all. I mean, the sky is pretty wide, the sun is really big, the moon rather small, and that this constelalltion can occur, it is so fascinating. 

Because my first experience with a total eclipse was before
I owned a digital camera, and I did not get to see totality at
the second one, I am taking this screen shot from
@visitfaroeislands as illustration. One of the many feeds I
follow on Instagram to satisfy my yearning for faraway places...

And now they have taken this beautiful and magic word and turned it into a virus name, everybody is freaking out and it is a bit difficult to maintain the fascination and awe at what ‚corona‘ used to mean for me. So I prefer to refer to the virus as covid-19, or just ‚the virus‘ and get on with it. But it has an impact on our lives which leaves us stunned, we don't know how long this will go on, will the economy recover, how severely will all the small shops be hit...

In any case, for one thing my nursing training has been affected and I don’t know yet how it will influence the point of or degree of my graduation next year. I will have to wait and see about that, but it is a bit unnerving. Certainly not a motivating factor, and I do think authorities should do anything they can right now to keep current or future nursing personnel motivated and inspired. The way that we (the nursing students) have been treated so far in this ‚crisis‘ is not going in the right direction. That adds to anxiety and I feel stressed. Much more so than I want to be, and that I would need to be. After all, my recent 'victory' should have set me totally at ease, put me into relaxation mode, and nothing can hurt me from now on. But it is not so. Minor things upset me and give me a lot of stress. That I am not used to in myself. And I certainly don't like that feeling.

When I have time, I try to keep stitching, and scrap therapy is the mode of action I have turned to. I went back to my yellow scrap box (no, scrap bag is not the right word) which I was working from for ‚A Scrap a Day‘ and which unfortunately did not decrease during that project… At first I was only piecing scraps together, not really knowing where it would take me.

Then some idea came about, I have a bit of shade gradation, and I will put some other colour around the pieces.

Not the entire arrangement, and nothing set in stone yet,
but at least something is happening on the design wall.

By now I have decided I had sort of enough individual pieces and want to proceed towards the background. And I have put the yellows aside. (Note: has it made a dent in the scrap box? Slightly. Not very noticeable yet, but at least one bag within the box has been depleted.)

This is only what I am taking away to clear the working area.
It does not constitute anything like the entirety of my yellow scraps, alas.

At first I was thinking the background would be in the purple range, for some reason I thought I would be working ‚complementary‘. But yesterday evening I started drifting towards shades of grey, and this morning I pulled a few fabrics from the stash.

It will be interesting to see where it goes. Perhaps stay with the lighter greys...? Or even with one single fabric that has a bit of variation in shades in itself?

Keeping oneself mentally occupied in viral times.