Still recovering from my various experiences with the post office and the arrival of quilts which were supposed to be exhibited at the Patchworktage in Dinkelsbühl ten days ago. Not all of them made it (on time), one was returned to the sender, for one I am still waiting for some sort of notification. But I am not going to go into details about that anymore - and I am not writing about Dinkelsbühl here, perhaps in a separate post in a couple of days.
Last week Friday was a big day in our family. My son received notification of his grade point average regarding his High School graduation and is now in the official chilling mode after final exams. Parents are very relieved, and a bit surprised that he reached such good results with what to us seemed so little investment on his side... But we are grateful he is done with secondary school and can now start finding his own way, outside of the Bavarian school system which bedazzled me for most of the time after he finished 2nd grade, and which I think never was a good system for him to be in. Official graduation is still a few weeks away, tomorrow he and three friends are going to Italy with our family car for a week, and the empty nest feeling is creeping in. I am not quite as much beside myself as on his first day of school, though, and still have to admit I am secretely grieving. If only I could have had a couple more ...
During the week prior to the announcement, while still waiting after his last exam, the two of us also had a serious talk about our vague plan (my carrot, to get him through school without having to repeat a year) of going to see the next solar eclipse in the US in April 2024. That happening, however, coincides with basketball goals and plans of his, and he was honest enought to tell me that those seem more important to him right now. As April is not entirely doable for me either due to various patchwork commitments on my side either, unfortunately I won't be going to see that eclipse. But we found out that there are several total eclipses coming up in the relatively near future and normally to be expected life-span of the ageing mother, and decided to grab as many of those as possible. I even typed the list into my phone. Which feels like making plans - however vague ones at this point - with a grown-up, so we are entering a new phase in our relationship. And that helps alleviate the creepy feelings of regret for not having been able to have more children when we finally had managed to have him.
After I posted the quilt I made for my son's birthday in my last post, with a fabric I had custom printed, my good friend Kathy Loomis suggested I could use tiny scraps of this fabric in all of my quilts from now on, as a reverence towards the importance his early drawings had in my development as a quilter. I liked the idea so much that I am following up on it. Currently working on my next piece for the 20 Perspectives group, with a reveal later during this month, I have inserted a few snippets of the fabric on the design wall.
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| Detail from Monochrome, as of yet untitled. |
| Still love working in yellow. Even if these snippets are not yellow. |
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