(Things are) Moving on

With all the things going on this summer I took a difficult decision late in August and canceled my trip to EPM in Alsace, although I really had been looking forward to it. There were several exhibitions I would have wanted to see, people I would have loved to meet personally, and it was the first time that the EQA exhibition was opening there, even being shown there.  Life then threw another unpleasant thing in my way, and I also had to cancel the workshop I would have taught at my beloved Petersberg. Fortunately, a long-time participant and friend agreed to act as substitute group leader and the workshop took place without me. The group is well established and many of them are so advanced in their patchwork proficiency that they don’t really need me as a ‘teacher’ anymore, and they could easily handle the newcomers. Keeping my fingers crossed that now, finally, things will begin to smooth down and the next time this workshop will be just a weekend as usual without any emergencies and unpleasant surprises or cancellations.

‘On the side’ of all this my husband and I packed up our belongings and house where we had lived for 19 years and 2 months. Our son had already left for Amsterdam in August, and it was our job to sort through too many items and stuff and books and and and… The movers arrived on a Monday and by late Wednesday morning every box and our furniture was on board. A last and final (14^th!) visit to the recycling station after the moving van took off, and then we followed the moving truck, spent a night on mattresses on the floor in the new apartment, before the movers joined us again to unpack on Thursday and Friday. Ever since then we have been working away at boxes. Most, but not all, have by now been unpacked.

 

It took a while before the kettle reappeared and we could make a decent pot of tea. And we were searching for the box with contents of the fridge for several days which somehow had disappeared. When we finally found it – out on the balcony, covered with a plastic sheet to protect it from the rain – the cheese was still edible as it had been a few cool days (although we merely grated it onto a veggie-dish baked in the oven.)

Other things have re-appeared, too.

Project for 20 Perspectives, already way overdue,
and not finished yet.

 

My sewing room is smaller than in the former house, and because the whole apartment is smaller than the house we need to readjust even further.

 First job was to make curtains for my son’s room. Rather idiosyncratic, and certainly not capable of winning a design award, but they do keep the early morning light out when he wants to sleep in a little bit.

And I have put something on my design wall, although it hasn’t progressed far yet.

 

I had a chance to take another look at my Sweater Somewhat Slanted, which keeps changing as it grows. 

 

This time the change was due to the need to re-dedicate the blue handspuns in the bag to enlarge the result of my Tour de Fleece 2024 effort, which had been to spin ‘all my blues’. That ended up with a good amount of 3-plied yarn, but not enough for a complete project. The slanted sweater, however, is so versatile in color placement, it doesn’t really matter what color goes into the remaining length of sleeve 1 and then sleeve 2. 

Still debating how I will fare with the neckline. Not sure yet...

 

And I had the immense joy of meeting up with Kathy (i.e. Kathleen Loomis), who had three hours off the boat on a river cruise in Bamberg, which is now relativle close to where we live. We had a lovely couple of hours in a café, catching up and chatting about what’s been happening in our respective lives. We agreed that it had been too long since we saw each other in person, and that it really was too short a visit, but better than nothing. Hopefully it won’t be quite as long before we get a chance to meet the next time!

 

Post Postal-Upset Syndrome, and more

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.

Detail from Monochrome, as of yet untitled.

Still love working in yellow. Even if these snippets are not yellow.

New Job.

It’s been 4 weeks since I started my new job, and it has been a rollercoaster for sure. All the things I learned during the past three years have simple receded into the background as a kind of white noise. Good to have as a backdrop, but not what I need for daily activities in the operating room. I need to understand the structure of procedures, learn where to find materials of all different kinds – and get a feeling for the team dynamics going on amongst a group of more than twenty nurses, the anaesthesiology team, and the doctors around them. I think the latter part of the challenge is the hardest. After two weeks the head nurse told me she was expecting me to be able to be the stand-by (without supervision) for a thyroid operation by Christmas – at that point that statement resulted in a slight feeling of panic on my side, but two days ago, on my four-week-anniversary, I thought, yes, that is definitely going to be possible.

Sometimes I get the feeling that some colleagues think I am not learning fast enough, at least their way of telling me things is not encouraging but a bit debasive, or even impatient. Some others are patient and friendly, though, so with a bit of self-empowering I think I am doing alright. However, on Friday I actually had to sit down after a morning encounter with one colleague (whom some call ‘the dragon’) and give myself a bit of a pep-talk: "It’s only been four weeks! and I am doing pretty well for that! I have learned a lot, I have understood a lot! It is a very complex field! I am doing fine, given all the circumstances!"

I don’t think it could have been much faster considering the mode of explanation and instruction, as it is all ‘learning on the job’ during a fully functioning operations schedule. I do have a mentor, but she is not there every time I am there, and after the first few days she has been assigned to a different operating room more often than not. There are many different ways of following the procedures, and every nurse has her/his own standard – and many different instructors make for a slightly longer time of figuring out exactly how my personal standard will be. Every once in a while I get to take home a bottle of distilled water that hasn’t been used up and that would have been thrown out otherwise. I will never have to buy distilled water for my iron again.

 

Only the fact that these plastic bottles will be on my mind after
using up the water... but I am using up the water, not just
dumping it down the drain and the bottle would be thrown
away then, too. Any suggestions for this dilemma, anyone?

As I am observing interactions between team members, trying to figure out characters and alliances, I am trying to keep a low profile. I want to work there, work well, and get along with everybody to such a degree that they consider me a reliable, trustworthy and – eventually, hopefully – competent part of the team.

When the operation is on, there can be times when not much is required of me. I watch, try to figure out the routine of instrument handling – and think of knitting patterns or yarn combinations. (That’s easier than quilt options.) A number of blog posts have been composed in my head, but never got written down, because when I come home I am exhausted. So not a whole lot of stitching has been going on. But I think I am getting to the point where I can give myself a certain routine at home after work, and will get back to stitching again. After all, some interesting developments are going on that I will be able to talk about in a little while. Right now I can say that I am making plans for a piece on the theme ‘bridge’, and I am planning to use some of the kimono fabric that I received from Kathy Loomis a few years ago. I even realized that I will make use of a piece I had begun but obviously never finished.

 

There is still a good sized piece of the (half) kimono
left. I can make several pieces with this...

Always good not to let anything go to waste!

Forced to Flee - SAQA exhibition goes zoom webinar

 My piece "Everyone has the right", a detail of which is currently showing as the opening picture on this blog, is traveling with SAQA's exhibition "Forced to Flee". It is being shown live right now:

Pauly Friedman Art Gallery at Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania: March 25 - June 6, 2021.

And an online panel and webinar will take place tomorrow, Tuesday, April 13, at 7 pm Eastern (US) time, as I was informed first by Kathleen Loomis, who also has a piece in the show and will be on the panel, before an official notification came from SAQA today, too. It is a free online event, all you need to do is register under 

tinyurl.com/MUQuilts

Unfortunately, because of the different time zones I won't be able to attend it myself, which I am really sad about. But perhaps some of you will be able to stay (or be) up (until) that time. I am certain it will be an interesting event.

Everyone has the right - text messages
(currently traveling in Forced to Flee)

The other pieces and participants in the exhibition can be seen online here, on the SAQA website.

Shutdown, days no. 1 through 4

 On Wednesday Germany shut down. Shops except for supermarkets and ‘relevant things’  are closed, contacts are supposed to be minimized, and there even is a curfew after 9 p.m. Because the shutdown was preannounced and there were two days left before it happened a lot of people still went shopping on Monday and Tuesday. Numbers of infections and dead are still rising... I am calling it shutdown now, because we are not entirely locked in. One can leave the house, move about, during the day and with a good reason, and going for a walk does count as a good reason. And it doesn't sound quite so rigid.

Weather here has been like this, 

 

although I have seen pictures from luckier friends in other parts of Germany who got some sunshine. I try to go outside for a walk at least once a day, but it does take a lot of courage to venture out in freezing point temperatures with this leaden lid pressing down. And I didn’t go today, just to the market, which was so full and the lines so long that I left again immediately without having bought anything.

I was off work and fiddled around at home. Trying to give the days a structure. My husband and son set up the Christmas tree, which is very unusual to do in Germany before the actual day of Christmas Eve, but we figured, why not. Especially since Kathy’s wonderful ornaments arrived pretty quickly after she had posted them, and we put them up at the very top of the tree as seat of honor.

 Thank you, Kathy, we love our growing collection of ornaments!

I enjoyed yesterday’s SAQA live chat which was scheduled at a more accessible time for European members. It’s fun to talk to some people from somewhere else, even if we don’t really know each other, the interaction is slightly awkward because of time lapse and because we don’t know each other. It’s a change in the daily routine.

And I received the rejection mails for both my entries to QuiltCon Together yesterday. Had expected they would be accepted? hoped, yes. Was I hurt? Very little. But it helped to see some big names from the modern sphere to admit and post that they were rejected, too. It’s good to feel that one is not alone.

The Quilt that sewed itself (Diary of recovery)

One of the first real-life impressions I had of Kathleen Loomis was when we were both attending a Master Class at Nancy Crow’s barn in Ohio and Kathy was showing one of her mind-boggling postage stamp quilts to some people in the room. I don’t remember whether it was “Spaghetti Sauce” or  “The Great Lawn” but I certainly remember what I thought when I saw her unrolling the meticulously packaged quilt of a zillion (or so it seemed) small pieces held together by thread lines: it was a mixture of sincere awe and asking myself whether she was out of her mind. (I like people who are slightly off the beaten track!) 

Meanwhile Kathy and I have become good friends, and even before I met her I did what she had done that eventually started her off on the postage stamp quilts: I used small pieces of fabric as sewing-on-sewing-off pieces to stabilize thread tension in between seams on a current project. But for a while I was getting to the point where they were accumulating and I did not know what to do with them, really. I used some on small quilts:

 

I used some on a T-shirt I had to mend at the side seam. I had cut out the washing instructions label and cut into the jersey fabric and did not want to throw away the new shirt, so I simply sewed two of the pieces on the side seam, a little later I also added some more on the edge of the neckline. And I have put some on certain spots of jeans that needed mending.

 

But overall I was at a loss – no way could I start making larger pieces similar to Kathy’s, it is so much her style that I would never have made a piece out of any number of these. On the other hand, having them at the sewing machine throat was just so handy, because it was so much easier to start and finish off a seam when using them. So when I saw a post on Instagram by Maryline Collioud-Robert / @mary_and_patch where she showed a ‘quilt that had sewed itself’ and checked up on the respective blog entry and realized that she was basically doing that same thing with scraps that she then put together into a scrap quilt, I knew that this phrase filled a need of mine.

But I took a slightly different approach. Last year I had started yet another piece with which I was going to commemorate more refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean – but with my increasing frustration about the whole situation I was growing more desperate, and at some point that quilt stalled. What use counting dead refugees by creating blue four-patch blocks…? The precuts and pieces that had been sewn already were left sitting there in a basket, another one amongst my too many unfinished pieces. And I had seen another post on Instagram, by DianaVandeyar /@dianavandeyar, whom I had met in South Africa last year. She was revisiting her many years of digital pattern designs and it included a design with four-patch blocks that set me on a track of thinking about what I could do with those blue four-patches. 

Here is where it all comes together, just in case you are wondering: I needed something to sew on and sew off, I wanted to do something with the four-patches and I liked the phrase ‘a quilt that sewed itself’. So while I was working on my lockdown-pieces, I also worked on the blue four-patches, finishing them, putting them into double-four-patches, and the whole thing grew into a large blanket. 

 

The process took off at a point where a number of four-patches had been finished, but it also included sewing a few last strips together, cut-offs into four-patches, and then four-patches into double four-patches with the oranges, and then double-doubles. So there were a few phases where a bit of planning ahead and preparing was needed, but I kept the planning to a minimum in order to be able to concentrate on the main quilt(s) for which this one was only the sew-on-sew-off .

Here are photos of the back in the making. I had so many double-four-patches left over once I decided I was going to eliminate the ones with yellow and stick to only basically orange for the front. Yet I did not want any leftover blocks, and I did not want to have to come up with another idea for them. So the yellow ones ended up on the back.

 

It has been quilted, and I do like how it turned out. Not sure yet whether it will also be entered somewhere but we will see. Now I need to get the binding on. And I have already started on my next quilt that sews itself as I sew on and off. This one is going to be a lot more scrappy, meaning there will at least for a while be even less planning needed. 

Thank you, Kathy, Marie and Diana – so much fun when inspiration is fed from different sources and it all comes together somehow!

“Daily Somethings” in SAQA’s Virtual Gallery (Diary of recovery 4)

As I was walking to the bakery the other day I saw this little piece on the sidewalk and instinctively stopped and stooped to pick it up. 

Yes, it is Covid19 times and you are not supposed to pick up stuff because it might be contaminated... but I didn't care. The action, and the instinctiveness of it, reminded me of last year’s project “Daily Somethings”, which had started as a Daily Art project, then I got behind, then I decided to cut it short by limiting it to 100 days, and finally I added some more things when I was picking up and collecting stuff in South Africa. However, I was extremely behind on the dailiness of it all, and then I started doubting the quality of what I was producing. At some point I was very close to putting it in the bin, but Kathy Loomis’ insistence that it was well worth finishing helped me push it through. I still wasn’t sure I liked it, but at least it was finished, and I was going to give it a chance for a public appearance. 

detail of "Daily Somethings"

So at first thought I would enter it for Birmingham, but then the Festival got canceled, then the virtual galleries were initiated, and then a SAQA call came up first. So I entered it there, thinking it could always still be entered for Birmingham after it got rejected from the SAQA virtual gallery.

Then I had almost forgotten it and the announce-by-date when Claire Passmore sent me a message last week congratulating me for being chosen. I once messaged Claire from a show where she had won a prize congratulating her before she had been notified by the organizers, who knows, we might be establishing a tradition here… I hadn’t seen the message by then but checked my mail and was quite pleased to find out that I was one of 28 chosen from over 150 entries. Not a real in the terms of physical exhibition, but it was a good piece of news to receive in the context of a week that was full of mood swings.

In my mess on my desk I have since found two more items that could easily qualify for inclusion in Daily Somethings, one of them being this label that was attached to a jacket I bought in the fall for its bright yellow color only. 

Even then I wondered about this label – there had been another paper one on the jacket declaring it ‘vegan’, and that almost put me off buying the jacket entirely because I don’t really believe in veganism, and certainly not in clothes. And I am old enough to remember when clothes like this would have been disapproved of as being ‘100% polyester’ in certain parts of the population, back in those days when ‘natural’ was the total hype. Times change, don't they? But I wanted this yellow, so I denied all my principles and went ahead and bought it. (Despite my ‘not buying any new clothes’ mantra.)

But I am not doing anything daily right now, and because I still remember vividly how hard it turned out to finish this one that I have only opened a little box where stuff like the metal piece and the plastic label will be living for a while. Something might come of them, but right now I am only keeping them.

Thank you, Kathy, for making me persist by believing in this piece.

Jagging edges, slowly.

We are beginning our ump-teenth week of covid-19 restrictions (with slight modifications) and although politicians are talking about ‘the new normal’ I have to admit that I am still finding it hard to accept this as a kind of normality. I have now been put to work in the ward at hospital that takes ‘light’ cases who do not need breathing machines – but right now numbers are down so far that this is basically a potential scenario only: we had one covid-19 patient yesterday, all the others are serious cases of some respiratory problems that were ‘suspects’ but tested negative. We will see whether the first round of easing up some restrictions – small shops were allowed to open again beginning of the week while wearing a mask when shopping or using public transport is mandatory – will result in rising numbers, or whether the first round was indeed won (‘keeping the reproduction rate below one’). But I don’t want to get into any discussion or reasoning about it all. 

My son is supposedly going to have some kind of school contact sometime soon, but we are assuming that there won’t be any kind of regularity in it before summer vacation. That same son of mine is turning fifteen today. He is not a baby or toddler anymore indeed,

Even here he wasn't a baby anymore - but that day he surprised
me by reverting to his one-time favorite pastime of throwing rocks
into the water which he hadn't done then for a while. Who knows
whether he would still do that today? He said he is 'too old' to
wear a handmade mask with a pirate skull which grandma sent him
and passed it on to my husband (I thought to myself, yes, right now
you are not old enough again to start enjoying stuff like that.)

and although I am absolutely grateful for the fact right now because I would go nuts having to tend to a child all day without being allowed to go outside to playgrounds with him, or let him meet other kids, I am a bit scared about what the future has in mind for him and his generation.

With all this in the background I nevertheless managed to focus to the degree that I am not constantly hopping from one project to the next any more and starting between three and five new WIPs per week. I have managed to concentrate on one big piece of sewing I am working on, one new project which was started by @mary_and_patch’s post on a quilt that basically sews itself, and one or two pieces of knitting at various points in the house. (The knitting I was sweating over for my last post has progressed and is in fact going pretty smoothly for now.)

The big piece is based on a sample I started in Kathleen Loomis’ workshop on her fine line technique that she taught here right after we returned from Prague oh so many years ago. It had been sitting on my shelf, then got deposited in a box, then reappeared during the recent attempts at decluttering.

I have gone through various stages of excitement, frustration, rearranging and despair and was close to shoving it back in the box day before yesterday. At one point I thought I had messed it all up because the edges between color fields were too straight for my liking. Not jagged enough.

How...

...to deal...

... with that cross?

Online suggestions from Kathy and Regine helped me over these bumpers and I think I am slowly getting somewhere. The trick is to relegate the longer seams, which are necessary to put it all together, into the second row so to speak. That way the direct confrontations between two colors will develop interruptions and make it interesting for the eye to look at. 

This is the color arrangement I currently want to work with, and I do hope
it all comes together soon.

By now the piece is getting to be far larger than I intended, but I was so happy that at least a kind of feeling similar to what once was a pretty regular experience of quilting flow happened, even if it was more of a trickle in spurts than a serious flow that I wouldn’t have wanted to curb that. If I want to stay in my time frame I need to keep working in a rather concentrated manner whenever I am home and can find time. That’s a good motivator and incentive. Perhaps that kind of new normality is something I will feel more comfortable about.