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.

Unwritten posts...

In my head I have composed at least 5 or 6 different blog posts over the past two weeks. One would have been title ‘intimated through admiration’ and would have talked about how I was struggling trying to quilt a top for Kathleen Loomis. I have always admired her work, and we have become close friends over the years after we met for the first time in a master class at Nancy Crow’s barn. She has entrusted me with two of her gorgeous tops and had given me the freedom to ‘do whatever you want’. When I suggested an idea for the first one, however, she didn’t like that one particularly, suggested something else and I started getting nervous because what she wanted isn’t easy to do on the longarm. I tried, but was thinking I was ruining her top, which resulted in stalled activity on my part. But we resolved the issue, and put off the second top for after the upcoming events that are keeping me very busy into June.

Another post would have been on important life decisions and how they are being taken.  Yet another one on the joy of the reopening of our open air pool which I consider to be the biggest asset of the small town we are living in, but which, as is sensible in German latitudes, closes from September through April, and we must be happy if it reopens on May 1^st already, and we don’t have to wait until the middle of the month. 

Then I went to the Nadelwelt in Karlsruhe and wanted to write about that, but by now I should know that it is virtually impossible to do that while the show is on if I still want to catch a sufficient amount of sleep… 

Plus, there are so many people who report about events like that that I have kind of decided that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to keep adding to that. But I did teach a class, and I could have reported on how that went, as it was a new class…

In any case, I have been very busy. Also with the preparations for the Textile Art Symposium that will begin on the coming Monday. I collected all the handwritten samples of articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that I will use, and it was fascinating to see people’s reactions. With some articles I had been the person to suggest for some of the participants that they write this particular article. But at the beginning, when only a couple of articles had been chosen, I was thrilled about how people chose ‘their’ article because it meant a lot to them personally. And even in the later stages, when I was suggesting, it turned out that my suggestions coincided with people’s special interests. I had asked a woman from Brazil to write an article in Portuguese, and as she was the last one in the long line, it was article 15 that had not been done before. The article on the right to have and to change a nationality. It turns out she had wanted to do so, give up her Brazilian nationality to become only German to reduce difficulties and bureaucracy. But Brazil does not allow that. Once a Brazilian, you cannot give that up, so she had double citizenship. Brazil does not adhere to the UDHR in this aspect. The woman writing in Hungarian chose article 20, on freedom of press and freedom to assemble, because she thought that was something to vex the current leader. And it continued like that.

People I have been talking to about the project find it interesting. Some did not even know there is such a thing as a Universal Declaration of Human Rights…

Article 1 in Xhosa

I have started stitching and am making progress, although I still don’t know whether I will be able to finish during the week we will be working in the public realm behind the City Hall. And after we had the warmest and driest April since the beginning of weather data recordings it is turning cold, and is supposed to rain next week… Might have to retrieve my ski underwear which I have already packed away for the summer!

Then there are all the things I did not do. But I won't lament about that. Somebody suggested I might have a problem saying 'no', which I had never thought about. Given the fact that my mother claims 'no' was the first word I said I had never thought it might be a problem. And I don't think it is. It is a problem, though, that I think too many things are important and should be paid proper attention. What I need to learn, it seems, is, to find out early enough how much of my personal attention that needs to be.

Into May

On May 1st our open-air swimming pool opened, and I made a point of actually dipping into the water. At 14 degrees centigrade that was not a prolonged swim, but today’s 18 degrees already felt much better. I actually swam 1200 metres and declare the summer swimming season officially opened.

We also pre-celebrated our May-clustered family celebrations on May 1^st, because we knew there wouldn’t be a whole lot of time on either of the birthdays, nor on the wedding anniversary. The boy will have a proper birthday party in a couple of weeks with his friends, the mother just sort of skipped her birthday as she was driving and setting up a stall on the day proper.

Meanwhile, I have been to and come back from the Nadelwelt in Karlsruhe, where I sold fabrics, 

made contact with Leni Wiener, who will be featured in one of the next issues of the German Patchwork Guild’s magazine, and have gone back to the sewing machine. Little stuff only at this point, but my entry for Made in Europe II is also in the line, all it needs is a facing and tunnel, and then it can go to the photographer, and I might actually make it on time. No pictures right now, as jurying is still coming up.

Teaching at the school has been very intensive again - we are waiting for work permits for several of the students who are from countries that are being considered ‘safe countries of origin’ and for which Germany’s government is pulling extra efforts to have people deported back. It’s not been an easy time for either these students or the other teachers and me, and two of the students have given up hope. They have moved on - and it was very sad to suddenly have empty spaces in the classroom. Others are still holding out, but hope is fading, additional reprimatory action is taking place these days, and we still don’t know what will happen. In the whole context of this, I don’t know whether I will be teaching at that school again next year. If only a part of the class - those who are ‘proper political asylum seekers’ - gets a permit, I don’t think I will continue. But as long as we don’t know, nothing has been decided yet. I admit I am torn - I love working there, I love teaching these people and getting to know them. But it has really interfered heavily with my quilt making, and it has taken such a huge emotional toll that I am not sure, how I want the situation to continue. Of course, next year, there won't be anybody from Senegal in the class, the situation will be entirely different in that respect. I don't know how the class would have been this year without the people from Senegal in there, either, but I am very grateful to have met and got to know them. It's just a bit difficult to be a witness to their struggles, hopes, and problems, and not being able to really help them with their personal situations...

Time flies like an arrow, and fruit flies like a banana...

That is one of the jokes I used to hear from my boss in former times, when I was still working as a linguist at the university... Sometimes it would be abbreviated to "Time flies like a banana", and then what? I knew it had been a while since I'd written my last post, but two weeks... has it really been that long? What have I been doing with myself?
I can assure you I have been busy. And I have been quilting. And dyeing. And teaching. And trying to figure out an almost twelve-year-old's mind... And not taking the time to sit down for the blog, obviously.

I have been working on a quilt for the German Patchwork Guild's AGM, coming up in June, for an exhibition of the members of the board in which they are supposed to prove that they can, indeed, quilt. This exhibition was initiated by our president Barbara after she had been hearing comments from quilt guild members that they thought the members of the board weren't really quilting anymore, just trying to make themselves important. For a while I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but because we had a prescribed size for which I could not pull out a quilt from my stack, I had to make something new. Plus I had the ambition to show something new. But it took a while until I had an idea. Now it is finished except for a few little stitchy touches.

text messages 11: yes, I can artquilt

And I am already working on the next piece in the series, text messages 12. That one, however, I plan to enter in the SAQA regional exhibition Made in Europe 2, for which the entry process opened today, so I won't post a picture here yet.

I have been doing longarm comissions, here is a detail of one of them.

I like quilting traditional quilts with the longarm machine. It is relaxing!

When I was taking off a few strands from a vest which just didn't please me as part of the design, I started thinking whether these could perhaps be useful in the 70,273 project.

But I admit that not much has happened in that direction beyond the thought.
Then I spent days frantically trying to catch up with the dyeing of my March-collection. The shipment of fabrics had been seriously delayed, by several weeks, and I only managed to ship the finished collection three weeks into April, when usually I try to get it out by the end of the month.

Now I am getting ready to go to Nadelwelt in Karlsruhe for the weekend.

In any case - I am still alive. And looking forward to spending my birthday on the road going to Karlsruhe, and then setting up the stand...