Cold Swimming in Difficult Times

It’s been a little over a year since I started a new chapter in my life by moving to the city of Ratzeburg in northern Germany, 

Ratzeburg, view of the ancient cathedral built in the times of
Henry the Lion

 

part-time. I started a job, working full-time for two weeks, going back south to be with my family, (now only my husband, the son has since moved to Amsterdam to study at the unversity there).

It started off great, I felt a lot of enthusiasm and thought everything would be good. Unfortunately, the job situation turned out rather more difficult than I had expected and is still not quite settled. (But as of today, it looks as if it will be more settled starting March 1.) Add to that the various crises of last year in the family realm that I don’t want to talk about here (anymore), and one could say that I would have been prone to fall sick due to exhaustion after overburdening. However, one, if not the major reason why I moved to Ratzeburg, of all places, is the fact that it is situated in a lake region. 

 

Family history and childhood memories had long ago anchored a deep yearning inside my soul that I wanted to live in a lake area, with easy access to water. It might well have been a Bavarian lake, but those somehow were always out of reach (and realty prices there are extremely high) and my husband did not want to apply for a position there. So when we had agreed that we would want to move to Ratzeburg for his retirement, a combination of circumstances led to my decision that I would go ahead and start putting down roots.

It was clear to me that I wanted to go swimming in the lake a lot, and I also knew that I wanted to swim (or rather: dip, in the winter) all year round. But I had heard that it is the ‘proper’ way to start in the summer and just keep going, never stopping when the water gets colder, to make adjusting easier. After I had moved in January, I spent the first two weeks getting acclimatized by wading in the water for a few moments, up to my knees, or a bit deeper, depending on the outside temperature and my clothing equipment. At that point I thought I would start going in for good in March, assuming the water would get slightly warmer then. In February, when I returned for my second round of work, I went to the lake on the evening when I arrived and waded – and when I went home, I thought “what the …, I can start immersing now.” And I did the next day.

 

Yes, it did feel cold. Especially cold around the neck, I thought. Yes, at first it did take a few breathing exercises when doing my swim strokes to avoid hyperventilating. And yes, one does feel numb when coming out of the water, and it takes a while, sometimes even a rather long while, to get fully warm again. But walking home takes care of that part, at least a bit, a kettle of tea upon returning home helps to warm up from inside, and the feeling of elation and completeness that occurs every single time is just unbelievable. Indescribable. Unsurpassable. Inexplicable. After three times, when I still had minor doubts whether I was being insane, I was completely hooked.

 

Going for a swim every single day that I am in Ratzeburg has grounded me securely, given me a structure and, I think, has kept me sane throughout the last year. And healthy – I have not had a single cold during the last year. So I want to sing a little praise for my lake. Very few people understand what I am doing, but I have found a good friend who does the same, and sometimes we go together. But most people also don’t understand that I came up with the idea of living temporarily apart from my husband and commuting back and forth with a now six-hour drive. I just must embrace my otherness - perhaps I would even qualify for being an ‘audacious woman’ in the meaning of Anne Boyd who writes a substack with that title, although I didn’t pack up quite as thoroughly as she did?

I have recently joined the rowing club, world famous in rowing circles, where my father used to be a member and train when he was young (and where my parents met many years ago).

 

What remains to be seen is how this move and change of life circumstances can positively affect my creativity, which it hasn’t done so far. But now, with a new start ahead of me, I hope it will eventually develop. And I will keep going for a swim in the lake every day that I am here.

A sort of planned post from almost long ago: 'Exhibition is on'.

The yeat is 2023, and although Life 1.0 took a precedence over creativity for a while and about 1/17th of the year is over, i.e. we are already facing the next Christmas again... I still want to publish that post I had written about my exhibition in October. This is how far I had got, and I will not correct or add or alter anything just now:

 Saturday was the big day, the opening started at 10.30 a.m. I was touched by how many people came. The mayor was there and gave a speech, making it her personal matter to celebrate that two recipients of the city's 'Culture Prize' - the museum and I - had teamed up together like this. 

Here is my husband talking to the mayor.

A lot of interested people came, some friends, and it was a friendly and open atmosphere.

***

As I said - I won't alter or add... although it is by far not as developed as I had thought it was... I will just go on with life!

Because now two quilts that were shown in that exhibition have exciting things happening to them. 

One quilt has found a new home, and the new owner is so excited to have it displayed above the sofa in her living room.

Shapes 20 in its new location

And the other one has just been juried into the German Patchwork Gilde's prestigious exhibition "Tradition bis Moderne" and will be traveling to at least 8 different venues throughout the next two years, including a stop at EPM in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines in September.

Mellowed Yellow

I had entered two quilts to be juried, and this one was my 'I hope this one gets in!', so I am very happy about this success. Sewing these scraps grounded me during the first Corona lockdowns, while I was listening to 'Pale Rider', and now it has turned into a successful entry, it was a good start to the year.

Snow-driven burst of creativity

 

We have snow on the ground. It would be enough for snow-dyeing. And I wouldn’t even have to negotiate with my son as to who gets which piece of the grounds because he is not interested in shoveling snow anymore. But I don’t have any pfd fabric in the house, haven’t prepared anything. It was interesting that several people approached me during these past few months whether I might take dyeing fabric for selling up again, and I was almost tempted to order a shipment. But there is really not a whole lot of time left besides working full time, and the temptation wasn’t quite strong enough.

Yesterday was very crisp and clear and cold, too, and on a drive to the next village where I dropped something off I got out of the car a couple of times to take some pictures. 

 

And in addition to that crispness, which made my creative juices flow I also saws Sidnee Snell’s post on Instagram of a quilt she had shown at the last zoom session of our 20 Perspectives group, and that got me really inspired. So I have been working on my piece for the upcoming challenge. I am not going to talk about it in detail here, just show a few pictures. 

I had the idea to repurpose one of the two sketches I contributed to the Patchwork Gilde @b.lange.patchwork ’s challenge for rendering swear words in textile form for the next magazine on the topic ‘150’. Before the pandemic I had bought this piece of fabric with prints of Frida Kahlo, 

 

and I took one head to turn her into a ‘Heulsuse’ (cry baby). 

 

I really liked the back view of it before I added the tears, but alas, that's gone now.

Now I am adding on to that piece, and it will make a nice detail of the finished quilt which is due by the end of February. I am using some of her features for special effects, too.

 

I decided to put the features into separate six-point-diamond arrangements, though.

 

 On the side, I am still working on my advent calendar spinning, I am up to date!

And yesterday I decided how to proceed with one knitting project where I will be running out of one kind of yarn eventually. I am changing colors in the lower part of the sleeves, and will do so in the bodice as well.

 

A good day, on the creative side.

By the way, the chicken don’t like the snow, they are staying in the area under the cover where there is still bare ground.

 

 

Life in April '22

I am in a process of decisionmaking that hasn’t been completed yet but takes a lot of time and energy. (Perhaps that's what behind my procrastination tactics I wrote about in my last post.) So it may be good to get back to being creative and sorting my plans and projects in that area to take my mind off the other stuff and let that sort itself a bit under the radar.

When you work in hospital you have to leave any kind of green-minded heart outside the front door. This holds true for working on a standard ward, but even more so when working in the operating room. The amount of packaging waste that is produced every day is unbelievable. I have seen a colleague save the blue wrapping from inside the containers for medical instruments for her house decoration projects, and sort of got into the habit of keeping them back for her. Now she has declared she doesn’t need them anymore really and every time I open one of those containers I find myself faced with one of those sheets. 

 

As you can see, I have kept a few of them for myself and want to try out how well they are suited for storing quilts in, but it won’t be long before all of the quilts I have that are currently unprotected will be covered in blue. Then I will most likely stop saving the blue wrappers. I suppose they could be used to make reusable bags, but I am not a person who loves making bags – or if I make a bag, it must be from fabric and last, this material will not last as long as fabric. So that’s not my kind of thing.

Then I start thinking about all the hospitals in the world, and the amount of waste they produce in the service of health, and I realize that my saving those sheets from landfill is really not going to make a difference in that global context. And if I don’t know what to do with them?

The same containers are sealed after sterilization with red clips, which need to be undamaged before we start preparations for an operation. If not, the container is not properly sterile, and will be sent back for sterilization. Sometimes I keep these opened red clips. 

 

Not all of the ones I handle, I would already be swamped if I did that. But the collection is growing, and I am considering how to include them in my intended piece for SAQA’s call for entry for RED.

Which I better get started on soon, or else I will be in dire straits about a deadline again.  And there are two more pressing-deadline-pieces on my worktable as well, these need to be done first.

Fondling Fabric

For our vacation after New Year’s we had originally planned to go and visit my brother-in-law and go cross-country skiing from there. However, not enough snow in the surroundings there, and some special reasons why we figured it would be smarter to not be around him at this time. So we stayed at home. No snow in our surroundings, either, and we ended up doing nothing much at all except for recuperating - my husband from a bad cold and a very very stressful year at work, my son from the first few months of 9^th grade and being 14 yrs old, and I myself from back pains that I am trying to battle with an intensification of my yoga (which I started a year ago).

So there was time for knitting and fondling fabric and playing around. Fondling fabric is always good for times like that, even if it’s sorting scraps from ‘light yellow’ heap to ‘nearly medium yellow’ heap or vice versa. But I did not do any sorting, although there would be enough stuff that needs cleaning up and sorting, but I wanted to do something at least sort of creative.

Just after Christmas I had finally received a shipment of plastic templates from DenyseSchmidt which I had found out about, again as so often happens these days, on Instagram. Paid heavy duty on these templates, too, which somehow I had not counted on. The original price, the shipment, and now the duty - these were expensive templates to want to have!

So I have been trying them out. 

Even had a bit of sunshine through my window onto the table... that always helps
to get through these short dark winter days.

I am pretty happy with how easily the curves come together, even with minimal pinning. I had always been very sceptical about prefabricated templates like this and believed in conscientuous pinning when sewing curves that are not entirely improvisational. But these templates I really like in their usability. 

I did not like the way my original thought – lots of red – was turning out - too little contrast, not enough bling -

and have decided to really go for a different mode of color combination. So far there is one block finished in the newly added color, light grey, but there will be more. And I have made myself a set of small paper templates to piece the curve slightly more regular, although I do like the scrappy appearance and will definitely keep including those as well.

At first I wasn’t really planning on anything, only wanted to try these out as a set and figure out whether I would be comfortable about suggesting these to students in my next class, which is coming up on January 31. But now I think I will use this to try and get me back into a sewing mood. No serious intentions included, but just sitting at the machine and putting scraps together, using up some unfinished tops or orphaned pieces might be a good way to start the year in terms of textiles. After all, I only need to go back to work on Thursday.