What on earth was I thinking...?

 It's spring. 

 

It's cold. But the magnolia is getting ready, 

 

and the blackbird, too (sorry, not a good picture, but I did not want to disturb her more, this picture was taken with a strong zoom factor.)

 

It's the month when - hopefully - a bit of a new phase will start for me. Working fewer hours, earning less money, of course, but hoping for a bit more time for creativity, caring for my family, gardening, life.

It started off well enough - first three 'working days' of the month (yes, Saturday counts as a full working day in dialysis) were off, and I took the opportunity to visit my parents and squeeze in a day at Nadelwelt Karlsruhe. Travel on Friday, the beginning of Easter vacation was a bit cumbersome with canceled train, delays and very busy. 

 

But I always had a seat, and when I don't have any urgent appointment waiting for me at the end of the journey, I usually prefer traveling by train. Going by car would have been so much more work, and Friday afternoons is bound to be caught up in traffic jams, too.

The Nadelwelt on Saturday, where I have been a vendor with my fabrics when I still did that, but it's fun to be there just as a visitor and steward for the members' exhibition of the PatchworkGilde Deutschland. 

 

I was most impressed with the two individual exhibitions by Ulla Hoppe, "Eine Frau sieht Rot" (A Woman sees red - the title is a pun on the saying 'jemand sieht rot', which means 'to get very angry/lose it')

"A Woman sees (through) red" by Ulla Hoppe.

 

and Textperiment, a group of four women who combine found metal scraps with textiles.

"Verdreht" (warped) by Susanne Oehlschläger

After I had left a bag under the table at the Gilde's stand I went to fetch it on Sunday and turned that into a chilly but nice bike trip down from the early hills of the Black Forest to the location of Nadelwelt, trying out how macro my phone lens will go on the way.

Return journey home was much smoother on Monday, and now I have seriously taken up the needle to finish the temperature quilt. Throughout March I had participated in @amyscreativeside's 'ig-quiltfest', was most frequently a day late with my posts and only skipped one prompt entirely, but had felt a bit at a loss about posting something for the prompt 'what was I thinking?'. When reading the list of prompts beforehand I had thought of a different direction than Amy eventually suggested in her daily explanation of the prompts, which appeared in my feed later than I had posted this one. That's the thing with time difference and dates, when Europe is ahead of the US. But now I certainly have a 'what on earth was I thinking'-moment. The circles Barbara Lange and I took out when I was longarming at her house recently and messed it up are supposed to be symbols for the full moons of the years encoded in the quilt, and when it happened I thought, oh, well, not toooo bad, I will just do those by hand, a bit of embroidery is going to make it more interesting. Yeah. Twenty-four circles, the stitch holes are very visible, and must be covered ... here we go.

At present, seven circles down, 17 to go.