You have a new subscriber…

About eight months ago I signed up for a Substack subscription/account/identity – I don’t even know, what it really is called. I had seen that Margaret Atwood was now publishing on Substack and I wanted to follow those posts. Soon followed India Flint, and by Sarah C. Swett (more on her in another post in a few days). As for ‘browsing’ and finding interesting new voices, that has not turned out to be the case for me, so far. I do not want to spend too much time on it and going down a rabbit hole, as I would rather spend more time making things than being caught in the digital web. 

But imagine my surprise when, a few weeks ago, I received an email with the title ‘you have a new subscriber’, and supposedly somebody has signed up to follow me on substack. I am not aware that I have registered as a writer, I thought I was just signing up for reader, and the only thing I have written are a couple of comments where I am allowed to. I am not a paying subscriber to India Flint, so I am not allowed to comment on her, although I might have given her a hint on the Bach piece she was talking about a little while ago. I do understand that this app is offering a place for writers where it is supposed to be easier for them to earn money for their writing by acquiring paying subscribers. While I am considering upgrading, perhaps, I had not even remotely thought about writing on Substack myself. When I was young, into my teenage years, I did say I wanted to be a writer. To be honest - the two or three novels I wrote as a teen were lousy and have been lost to the obliteration of times. And somewhere along the line I gave up that yearning to write novels. Can't come up with a good plot and pull it throuhg, although I did find three or four fantastic first sentences that would have made good entries.

I have indeed published a book – my PhD thesis, not exactly a bestseller that made me rich, and, to be honest, I don’t even know whether it could still be bought, after all, that was 20 years ago. I have written a good number of more or less interesting newspaper articles for our local paper, but gave that up a while ago because that was rather low paid. I write this blog – not regularly enough, and, for my liking, not always interestingly enough, although some posts were pretty good, I think. And I write for the German Guild’s quarterly magazine for members, which is fun. Unfortunately a couple of times the people I wanted to write about had just been ‘done’ by the commercial magazine Patchwork Professional, which meant that we put off the feature in the Guild’s for a while and may return to it at a later point. 

However, I wonder what that lone subscriber was expecting, how he (male name) came across ‘me’, and why on earth he subscribed to somebody who had not published a single post. 

Since April I have been working 60% and had thought I would be more relaxed for sitting down at the sewing machine. Then I would have had interesting stuff to write about here, too. Hasn’t happened. The 60% is still encompassing a lot of emotional energy, my husband’s illness is not exactly for the light-hearted, or at least I can’t take it light-heartedly. And July was Tour de Fleece, as mentioned in my last post. As last year, I spun along. This year I did not have 3 weeks of isolation, so I wasn’t expecting to accomplish really much in that area, but as it is the closing date today and I looked at what I managed to spin, I think I did pretty well. 

First goal had been to ‘spin every day I am in town’, and finish as much of the red as possible. That happened pretty quickly. 

Went ahead to spin the third thread for the 3-ply.

I plied the red, 

 

then re-started on this very fine cashmere-something mixture (which I am still working on), for spinning at home, and the bobbin is much fuller now.

 

And carded most of my blues together to have another spinning project for when I take the traveling wheel to go and spin somewhere. 

 

Which I did a bit this week, twice, ending up with an impressively full blue bobbin right now, and still a good load of more blues to spin in the future. 

 

But the tour is over. A lanolin bath was in order.

 

I am not measuring, but I like the pictures of what I have done. So perhaps, hopefully, back to the sewing machine again. Putting on the backburner the things at work that have been tying up my creative energy more than I appreciate. And – I am going to Festival of Quilts this coming Thursday. That should be nice. But not a whole lot of sewing will be going on during those days, either.