Jagging edges, slowly.

We are beginning our ump-teenth week of covid-19 restrictions (with slight modifications) and although politicians are talking about ‘the new normal’ I have to admit that I am still finding it hard to accept this as a kind of normality. I have now been put to work in the ward at hospital that takes ‘light’ cases who do not need breathing machines – but right now numbers are down so far that this is basically a potential scenario only: we had one covid-19 patient yesterday, all the others are serious cases of some respiratory problems that were ‘suspects’ but tested negative. We will see whether the first round of easing up some restrictions – small shops were allowed to open again beginning of the week while wearing a mask when shopping or using public transport is mandatory – will result in rising numbers, or whether the first round was indeed won (‘keeping the reproduction rate below one’). But I don’t want to get into any discussion or reasoning about it all. 

My son is supposedly going to have some kind of school contact sometime soon, but we are assuming that there won’t be any kind of regularity in it before summer vacation. That same son of mine is turning fifteen today. He is not a baby or toddler anymore indeed,

Even here he wasn't a baby anymore - but that day he surprised
me by reverting to his one-time favorite pastime of throwing rocks
into the water which he hadn't done then for a while. Who knows
whether he would still do that today? He said he is 'too old' to
wear a handmade mask with a pirate skull which grandma sent him
and passed it on to my husband (I thought to myself, yes, right now
you are not old enough again to start enjoying stuff like that.)

and although I am absolutely grateful for the fact right now because I would go nuts having to tend to a child all day without being allowed to go outside to playgrounds with him, or let him meet other kids, I am a bit scared about what the future has in mind for him and his generation.

With all this in the background I nevertheless managed to focus to the degree that I am not constantly hopping from one project to the next any more and starting between three and five new WIPs per week. I have managed to concentrate on one big piece of sewing I am working on, one new project which was started by @mary_and_patch’s post on a quilt that basically sews itself, and one or two pieces of knitting at various points in the house. (The knitting I was sweating over for my last post has progressed and is in fact going pretty smoothly for now.)

The big piece is based on a sample I started in Kathleen Loomis’ workshop on her fine line technique that she taught here right after we returned from Prague oh so many years ago. It had been sitting on my shelf, then got deposited in a box, then reappeared during the recent attempts at decluttering.

I have gone through various stages of excitement, frustration, rearranging and despair and was close to shoving it back in the box day before yesterday. At one point I thought I had messed it all up because the edges between color fields were too straight for my liking. Not jagged enough.

How...

...to deal...

... with that cross?

Online suggestions from Kathy and Regine helped me over these bumpers and I think I am slowly getting somewhere. The trick is to relegate the longer seams, which are necessary to put it all together, into the second row so to speak. That way the direct confrontations between two colors will develop interruptions and make it interesting for the eye to look at. 

This is the color arrangement I currently want to work with, and I do hope
it all comes together soon.

By now the piece is getting to be far larger than I intended, but I was so happy that at least a kind of feeling similar to what once was a pretty regular experience of quilting flow happened, even if it was more of a trickle in spurts than a serious flow that I wouldn’t have wanted to curb that. If I want to stay in my time frame I need to keep working in a rather concentrated manner whenever I am home and can find time. That’s a good motivator and incentive. Perhaps that kind of new normality is something I will feel more comfortable about.