An eerie little respite...

 

For months on end everything has been closed, no workshops or gatherings or even visits with more than one other person possible. Then it seemed as if numbers were going down, a new regulation for adult education centers was announced (my son was alternately going back to school, too) – and the workshop at my usual retreat place Petersberg, north-east of Munich, scheduled for this past weekend, was happening. Only a third of the people who had originally signed up actually committed to coming under the strict hygienic regulations posed by the administration, but the director nevertheless decided that it would be ‘on’.

At first I had been sceptical whether I wanted this to happen, or did I want to go – it meant a severe cut in revenue, after all, and as I had been expecting it to be canceled I had thought about other things to do for the weekend (i.e. finally get serious about studying for my upcoming exams). But after a number of unpleasant experiences last week I was happy enough to get out when time came around, packed my car, and took off.

 

A bit of dramatic sky on the way there – we have been having rather cold temperatures with April-kind-of-weather. And then we were the only group, eight people, in a house where normally there can be up to eighty people. It felt a bit eerie indeed. Eight small peas in a large pod...

But we were determined to make the best of it. I had posited that we talk about anything expect the Big C thing, and although in a few instances little references happened, everybody in the group was eager to check everybody else. We had a lovely weekend sewing, chatting, trying out stuff. It wasn’t a workshop, because we felt that the others who didn’t come but still somehow belong to the group (it’s a rather consistent pool of participants who regularly come to the gatherings) shouldn’t be left out completely. They actually 'joined' us twice for brief zoom interactions.

I enlisted everybody present to make one example of the block ‘burgoyne surrounded’, which is the topic of the current sew along I am hosting for the German Guild, and we came up with a nice selection of examples. 

 

Iris tried an inversion with two colours.

Gina tried her hand on the smaller version
where the small squares measure 1/2 inch only.

A display of (most of) the examples made by the group
(a portion of the light blue ones in the right upper hand corner
I had already made at home and brought with me, I
would not have been able to make that many, they do take time...)

Some of them I may use for further explorations of the pattern in the next few weeks. For posting on social media we even dared take a photo for which we dropped our masks briefly after having set it all up in an almost socially distanced array.

 

Numbers of infection are on the rise again, and the house may have to close down again perhaps day after tomorrow. So this was a strange little heavenly retreat. But it gave a feeling of almost normal, at least until the moment when we had to leave again Sunday afternoon.