After too long a time

 I returned to my sewing machine last week.

Because of family reasons I had not been near it for more than six weeks, and felt rather deprived. I had fun at the Patchwork Gilde’s annual event, which took place after my last post.

Susan Vogel and I showing off our certificates for 
presenting exhibitions at the AGM-weekend. Susan 
was responsible for the EQA Round Bobbins (I loved her husband's 
wonderful accompaniment of the event with his didgeridoo 
playing), and I took care of the EQA Contrast Challenge.

 

The Round Bobbins, quite an impressive exhibition in real life!

I did teach a 3-hour workshop on improvisation, which made me 
rather nervous in advance, partly because three hours is just 
too short to get people into an improvising mood. But once I got going, it was fun.

I had knitted a sweater in the meantime, as part of a knit-along, and I finished only a few days after the ‘official’ end date, which is quite astonishing for me as I tend to be not-good-at-all with these x-alongs. With this one, I had chosen a (rather expensive) yarn from my stash with a high linen-component and found quite a lot of tiny fiber pieces in the yarn that made me suspicious whether they would bother me when wearing it, so I spent A LOT! OF! TIME! Picking out those pieces, which, of course, slowed down my process considerably. 

 

I was actually happy with the result, and I had even sort-of-liked the way the instructions were written, at least to me they did not seem quite so clumsy as many other written instructions, and I thought I might knit another sweater after that mode again at a later point in time. 

 

I really liked the combination of the light green and the variegated red...

Unfortunately, because the linen yarn had not been enough and I had supplemented it with a silk yarn from my stash (from India – should have made me suspicious!), which really enhanced the outcome, danger was lurking that I did not suspect. Having been a dyer I should have known… The sweater came out of the first wash completely ruined because the read had run and turned the light green into an unpleasant brown. Home remedies to take out the discoloration exacerbated the catastrophe and I threw the sweater into the bin. That’s a way of de-stashing, too. Threw away the remaining skein of the red yarn as well.

 

The green had lost its lustre completely after the first wash, and things 
got even worse after I tried home-remedies against discoloration.

Upon my arrival at my husband’s place last week I first put the sleeve on my contribution to the EQA-challenge “Insects” that will be shown in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines. Being the one who organizes the transport I am in a fortunate position that I can still finish my piece even after the deadline has passed…

"Picasso Beetle in Yellow", 35x35cm, 2026.

 

Then I picked up the beginnings of my third piece in the Femina series for 20 Perspectives, which would have been ‘due’ on the day of my return. It was completed yesterdaymorning, and you can read a little bit about it here. (I did sleep on it for another night and changed something this morning.) I am not sure whether I am really happy with it, so it is more of a chore finished. Which is a pity as I was happy enough with the first two pieces in the series. But I really struggled with this one, and I feel I have been struggling with my quilting for a while now, so I need to get going with getting my creative juices flowing again.

I have decided to start a piece for the juried EQA exhibition “Desire” for February and concentrate on getting that finished, perhaps this will help get me back on track.

Staycation

My husband and I are on vacation - staying at our home in northern Germany because our son will be going to Australia for his semester abroad in July and we can't afford to go anywhere else right now. It feels really good not to have to go to work for a couple of weeks, I must say. I had not fully comprehended how exhausting the first few months of the year had been at work! Actually, I am starting my vacation days only today, and I have two more weeks. Nice!

This morning I left the house without taking my phone with me, which was hooked up to be charged, and I simply forgot to take it. By the time I realized I had already gone to far (by bike) that I didn't want to go back and fetch it. I didn't think I really needed it, and I didn't really. But knowing it wasn't there, I almost felt a bit, well, naked, because I had several instances where I wanted to reach for it, perhaps take a photo, or to take a note. We had gone to a book store, and I would have wanted to take down a few titles for perhaps later reading, trying to get those books through my e-book-club as I am trying to be serious about buying fewer books. The frequency of these reflexes reminded me of a moment when I was taking an online class with Lisa Call many years ago and she told us she had 'put her whole life on her phone' and at that point I thought I would never want to do that. To be honest, perhaps not my whole life, there are things digital I don't do on the phone, but isn't it amazing how much we depend on these things these days? Many advantages, but so many not quite so advantageous developments as well, and how often do you reach for the phone when a moment could be spent just being yourself by yourself and then you end up caught up in some social media environment instead. I have noticed changes in my concentration and consistency with which I follow tasks that have alarmed me, and consequentially I am trying to be more conscientious about using the phone. But it's hard going, trying to extract oneself from that digital web. And, to be honest, I love the fact that I can feel connected to many people around the world, talking to my friend in Australia, in Canada, in the USA...

So when we went for a walk this afternoon I took the phone with me again and took photos of the surroundings, the forest is just turning green.

 

I took my plunge today at a different small lake than usually.

 

Only a few kilometres from here used to be the German-German border 
from 1949 until 1989. This entire area profited from this phase of 
borderline existence and is now a natural reserve. Unfortunately, 
some people don't respect easy things such as keeping dogs on a leash, 
or keeping them out of the water. There are 3 places for visitor to take a swim, 
though.

I am happy that the apple tree I planted just a few weeks ago is already in bloom, quite abundantly for its size. (After flowering season I will remove any potential fruit beginnings ths year, so it can concentrate on building strong roots this year. But let the bees have their fun first.)

It is a bit cold for the bees still, and very windy, so I don't think 
there are that many of them out there right now.

Did some gardening, too, and am slowly discovering what's growing 
in the garden that I am seeing in spring for the first time now.

 

Spending time knitting, during my last lengthy train ride I did some serious swatching, resulting in not being able to make up my mind about which pattern to choose.

I probably have enough yarn of each color for a sweather by itself, 
but right now I think I want to combine the two, to reach a bit of diversification.

 

So I started trying myself at a knit-along. 

 

Picking a lot of debris from a rather expensive hand-dyed linen and silk yarn which is slowing me down a lot. But as I am a person who removes any label from clothing because it bothers me I am afraid that these little pieces protruding from the yarn will be a nuisance. 

 

By now it has become clear what I assumed from the beginning anyway, that I don't have enough of my original choice of yarn and I will have to morph into another color. Which is a clear plus in terms of color and interest to the piece - and with regard to the picking out of linen pieces, too, because the red does not contain any of that. I hope, when I progress further, I will be able to knit a lot faster, as the picking out makes it rather slow going right now. But I don't want to abandon the green altogether, I'd rather get it out of my stash now than having to come up with another solution.

 

Thinking about new quilt projects, too. 

This one was started before we went north, so it looks a bit different 
already and has gone beyond mere 'thinking about it'.

 

This one is emotionally charged, and still brewing.

And waiting for my custom printed fabric for my next piece of femina.

Presence in Quilts only, Life 1.0, and on entering the status of being a Senior Citizen

Life 1.0, as they now call it, has again taken over and silenced my posting.

So many things happening, so much to do, and with the work-life-arrangement that I have now it is a bit more difficult to get to a sewing machine. All my fabrics are down south. And when family obligations (mother, visiting my son in Amsterdam) keep me away from that place, there isn’t much sewing time to be found. 

But visiting Amsterdam was fun and interesting. And annoying. So many tourists (me amongst them, of course). What a beautiful city - I knew that from my first visit approx. 33 years ago - and how terrible for the people who live there to be so flooded with all those tourists.

 

I love my new mug from that city, which my son brought me for my birthday.

Well, I have been knitting, and a sweater is finished. From handspun fiber, spun last year, and the sweater was started this year, so it’s not as if I haven’t done anything.

Trying on the experiment as WIP

 

I have used a trick at the upper end (the sweater is knit top-down,
as is so in vogue right now) that I was really proud of when I started
after having the idea, but it needs a bit of tweaking still, so
I won't say anything about that yet until I have figured it out more thoroughly.

 

I had three quilts hanging in Brno last weekend – the ‘I think I hate this quilt’, which had already been on display at the Glasgow Quilt Show in March, and a small one that I entered in the festival challenge, "A Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose". That one is traveling with the shows collection now.

 

And SAQA's Wide Horizons  exhibition was there, so “Seeing Red” was there, too – again, because I had entered it in the competition there last year. Even though I could not be there in person, at least I was present in quilts. Perhaps next year will offer an opportunity to go there in person again, I hope.

And I have started not only planning

 

but also working on my next contribution to the regular 20 Perspectives challenges. Although a lot of work still needs to be done on this one, and I wonder when I will have time to do just that.

As of this Sunday I have entered the status of being a Senior Citizen. No longer a 5 in the beginning of my age information. A few years ago I had thought I would want to have a special celebration on this occasion, inviting a number of to-me-important-women in my life for a hang-out together in some nice place, making it an all-women gathering. I even set up a special section on my account to which I transferred a regular amount every month. Unfortunately, that financial hideaway had to be raided several times for unexpected expenses and never amounted for enough to even consider any kind of gathering. Add to that the fact that the male two thirds of the family were slightly offended when I once mentioned that I was considering celebrating like that, i.e. not including them in the group. So I celebrated with my son (my husband had to work and could not come), and put off the girls-gathering for a little while, giving the funds a chance to reaccumulate (and telling myself they will not be raided again for anything else). And perhaps I will change the set-up a bit, away from a birthday celebration, so the guys won't be offended at not being included in a birthday celebration, as it won't be one, a few years from now. I will brood about this a little bit more, and we will see what happens.

Critical Appraisal of an Older Sweater

In June of 1991 I traveled to Finland, near Joensuu. My then-partner and I had rented a cottage from friends of his family and spent two weeks on a lake, remote from everything else, with a small sauna on the property and a boat to take out onto the lake. I was studying for my final exams at the university, which at this stage meant that I had a number of novels to read that I would be examined on. For several days I sat out on the lake in the boat reading Charlotte Bronte’s novel ‘Shirley’. I loved the Finnish landscape, the little lake, we had good weather.

On one of the days we went to visit the friends we had rented from, and I remember that the mother of the family talked to us about the historical fact of divided people. It was only one and a half years after the Wall had come down, less than a full year since German reunification, and the topic was very much present those days. She mentioned that Karelia, the region they were living in, was still divided, because part of it is part of Russia. I had no significant knowledge of Finnish history then, apart from the fact that there had been a Russian-Finnish War, and had never thought much about the effects that had on people living there. But we got talking, she had seen me knitting something, she talked about Karelian knitting patterns, and I ended up copying a pattern she claimed was ‘typically Karelian’.

 

On our trip home, when we had a couple of hours to spare, I insisted we go and try to buy some ‘real Finnish yarn’ so I could knit a Karelian sweater. (I assume my then-partner must have thought me a bit out of my mind, but he obliged.) And I did knit that sweater. Which I still have. It hasn’t been worn a whole lot because the yarn turned out to be more itchy than I had realized, and even recent bathing in lanolin hasn’t helped with that a lot. It is a sweater to be worn over a not-too-thin turtleneck, otherwise you’ll be unhappy. 

 

But it fits well. And when I look at it now, I am still pretty pleased with the result. All I had was the hand-drawn repeat of the Karelian pattern. No further instructions, but then that is how I always knit or why I have severe problems when trying to follow a knitting pattern that tells me to cast on 32 stitches and knit 20 rows instead of giving me centimeters for a specific size. I swatch, I measure the body or arm length, I calculate (one of the most useful things I learned in Math – Pythagoras’ Rule of Three!), and then I start knitting. But I never learned how to do a proper design. So I suppose if I had been more educated about these things I might have given some thought to whether the repeats matched nicely on the sides of the raglan lines in the upper part. 

 

It didn’t occur to me then. And I don’t mind. And I am not sure I would be willing to do the maths to avoid that 'problem' if I were to start another sweater with a colourwork pattern without instructions these days.

 

All I want to do is  to get it a bit softer, if possible.

(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!

 

Farewells, too many

 

Waiting for a train last Saturday I strolled around Hambur harbor
for a little bit. Remembering the concert in Elbphilharmonie that was
interrupted by a fire alarm - and today I saw that that had happened again...

It’s all been a bit much lately, as I already wrote about a little while ago. So far, it hasn’t exactly eased up. The weekend before last brought two decisive farewells to go through.  Either of which would have been enough on its own, but both of them within less than 24 hours, and in the wake of all that’s going on…

The first one was the last and final farewell to my father, who had peacefully passed after four long and hard months in hospital. 

Hans Lenk, 1935-2024

 

We took him to his hometown to be buried in a site where he looks across the lakes that were so important in his life as a rowing champion, right next to the church where my parents were married. 

Looking out over the lake from a different angle.

 

The Eight that went on to win the Olympic gold medal in Rome

As sad an occasion as it was, the whole family agreed that it was a very comforting get together, to see each other after sometimes many years.

The next farewell, on the morning after the funeral, was to send my son off to college. The original plan had been that I would have driven him to Amsterdam and set him up in his dorm. As plans had to be changed and I had to go back to work on Sunday, that was not feasible for me, instead, my husband took him there and then continued home on his own. He did a lot of driving that day! (I had told him to stop and check into a hotel along the way, which he didn’t, just catching a bit of sleep in the back of the van and then continuing on, so I’m afraid I don’t really need to feel very sorry for him.)

Hard to say which one of the farewells is more difficult to deal with.

I feel immense relief that my father has been spared further suffering and treatments in the hospital, or even the care-taking situation he might (most certainly would) have found himself in had his weakened heart not finally given up. And I feel rage at all the back and forth he had to go through for almost four months when doctors kept operating on him, he was being shoved back and forth between various hospital wards and receiving more and more antibiotics that weakened his body and enabled an infection to grow so they could not get it under control in the end. It’s bitter to have seen a strong, successful, smart and intelligent person like him diminished into the weak, suffering and sometimes deranged vegetable that he was during his last weeks. And I question the ethics of modern-day medical technology and their ‘let’s do this and try that’, putting elderly people through ordeals that yes, perhaps increase their life span by sheer number, but at what cost of quality of life? (I also see this at work, every single day, and I have had several people my father’s age and older talking to me with tears in their eyes at what was happening to them and why did they have to go through this – well, at least my father was spared their specific kind of medical ordeal. Which doesn’t make it any easier.)

On the other hand, my son, a grown young man now, taking off into the big adventure of studying, moving to a different country, setting out to conquer the world. His arrival in my life happened when we had given up hope that we would be able to have a child – and then the miracle happened after all, completely natural, and he was a fun and vivacious boy with a strong personality, a compulsive and recognizable laughter and a charming personality. 

 

Yes, some issues between headstrong mother and headstrong boy, but no drug incidences (at least none that I heard of), and he spared us the possibility of the tattoo he and his friends were talking about just before their last joint vacation venture (they came back with ugly crew-cut kind of haircuts, which, thankfully will grow out before they grow seriously older). He was a fun kid to have, and as I have been noticing that the covid-lockdown-induced-sullenness seems to be lifting somewhat he has recently been developing into a very amiable youngster, I have also been hearing such appreciative things about him from outside that it truly has given me joy. Even if sometimes parents wish the children would act differently at home, it seems he has been doing just fine outside the house, and what else does one want? I did not get to take him to Amsterdam, but first reports have been positive and buoyant, and we are optimistic that he will find his way.

He left behind his piggy bank into which he had been depositing his small coins. 

 

I sorted through that heap of change, differentiating between 10- and 20-cent coins (my pocket), 5-cent coins (counting towards my next visit to the Munich Readery bookstore for second hand English books) and the 1- and 2-cent coins I will dump into the coin-collector at the local supermarket where the amount will be deducted from your next bill. The pig itself was mine, anyway, which he claimed at some point. It has lost its belly-button-stopper and I need to find a replacement for that, but I suppose I can now claim it back, for a while at least.

I admit, these farewells have left me frequently welling up in tears lately. Still packing up the house – my desk and more of my sewing room are next and highly urgent now. Creativity is still on the back burner, only infrequently do I find time and leisure to sit down and ‘make’. A bit of knitting here, a bit of spinning there.

"All my Blues" is taking all my blue spinning fibers,
these two bobbins remain to be plied.

The next spinning project in preparation: "All my Reds"

The towel somewhat slanted, growing slowly,
with a few more mistakes incorporated.

But I have challenges coming up that I can at least think about and do a little bit of research for. I have been invited to become part of the group ‘Voyage’, which was a pleasant experience. Depending on how quickly I manage to unpack my stuff at the new place after our move at the end of September I may join in with their planned exhibition for March/April (although that would mean a pretty tight timeline for completing the quilt). And there are two more pieces to be made for the current theme of 20 Perspectives.

Life goes on, despite farewells (more coming up, but those won't be as significant as these recent ones) and difficult times.