Good Riddance – good-bye to month no. 11

 Biding Time (pun intended) is what I seem to have been doing. 

 

November and I don’t go well together in any normal or good year, but add a dose of pandemic, including lockdown during what would have been 3 weeks of vacation that were meant to be a first trip to the International Quilt Festival in Houston... forget it. Too much anxiety for my taste with the elections in the US ... but one can only be thankful for the result, even if so much still seems vulnerable before the transition is done. More than a complete week without any sunshine at all – something like that kills me! 

 

So I seem to have taken a non-premeditated break from blogging, but that is just as well. I would not have been able to write positive posts, and I certainly don’t want to be lamenting or whining here.

I was making. But not really in terms of art. I am spinning a sweater quantity of yarn I have partly carded myself with my recent acquisition of a carder.

I am knitting, several different projects parallel to each other, and it would make much more sense to concentrate on one and get it done than to be jumping from one to the other.

I taught another online class for the German Patchwork Guild, basics of HST making, and the participants were happy. And grateful to be involved in something that was getting their mind of the pandemic and lockdown measures. As it was doing for me.

And suddenly I found myself writing instructions for a project that could be run by the Guild to keep members happy. I had been caught by an image in a copy of France Patchwork’s magazine from earlier in the year, it got me hooked, I started researching, and so I ended up sewing several large blocks using a stack of printed fabric samples from an Australian company that had still been waiting in my boxes. 

 

I will not show the top in its entirety, although it is finished as of yesterday, as the final decision as to how the set of instructions will be put to use for members of the Guild has not been made. But I am happy with the result and will quickly put it on the longarm. The most remarkable thing about this is that I really do not enjoy writing instructions, as I myself don't like working from them, in neither medium that I dabble in. So this could indeed be considered a miracle of coronal times, on a very small and personal level. (Though I have found myself thinking 'had I known that there would indeed be a way of making some money from writing and selling instructions' as many people seem to be doing these days, I might have taken more care to make myself adept at doing so, way back then. But no use crying over spilt milk, and I am not going to start with that now any more intensively than this, for sure.)

I wanted to enter my yellow scraps quilt from the first lockdown phase in SAQA’s ‘Light the World’ exhibition. But guess what – it was too big. Not my first time... And it had not been made directly for this challenge, but it was a disappointment. Luckily I had an alternative, and entered both, the Quilt that Sewed Itself and the Mellow Yellow for QuiltCon Together. I was a day early for the deadline, so could actually get pictures of the binding, as was required for the entry. 

 

I am not really expecting them to be accepted, but they are getting their chance.

I am participating in an online workshop with Phyllis Cullen and Cindy Richard who have just published their book “It’s all about the face”. It was not my intention to start making portraits, but I liked the presentation the two of them gave for a regional SAQA zoom meeting in August, and now is as good a time to learn something new. And there are a few people whose portrait to make might be fun, so here I am, I bought MistyFuse (no, I don't fuse!), and I am through with the first exercise, in terms of layering. And looking forward to getting started on my own photos or ideas.

A woolen blanket from New Zealand, which came home with me many years ago when I bought a painting from a (then) young painter and brought it back on the plane has become a new mending project. 

 

The hole has been fixed, but there are still several areas that need reinforcement, so there is time to be spent on that. And then I can use it for my yoga blanket when I need one.

Because I have been doing online yoga with a teacher (Kristina Krüger ) I had met during my week-long stay at the Yoga Hotel Kubatzki . Kristina suggested on the first of this month that we take the remaining not too many days of this year to take a kind of inventory of the good things we learned during this strange and frequently unpleasant year. So by the end of the month we would come up with at least 31 things that were positive. I like the idea. And I am already behind on making my list. One thing that I have definitely learned is that it does me very very good to get up before breakfast and do a good yoga workout before the real day starts. Getting up in the dark, with the current mood, however, is not easy. I try. And sometimes I succeed.

Looking back on what I have written, it doesn't sound as if month no. 11 was quite that bad. Nevertheless, I do hope we will be able to travel again, soon, and I can take off during this month, see the sun somewhere and get out of here during this time of year!