Putting myself back in normal life again...

 

 Two weeks with important dates have passed recently. Three days of written exams for me, and a few days later the oral examination. Only one more part of the exams and then a few weeks of waiting for the results, until the middle of September. Of course, that is a long wait, and several people have told me that that is not exactly according to German law - we should be given the results of the overall performance after the oral exam and then be considered a fully qualified employee. But the virus has influenced all this, normally we would have had to wait for the final oral exam until the middle of September, and then it would have been in accordance with the law. But I don't really care about that right now - I am not really worried that I might not have passed, so I can wait after that practical exam is over coming Thursday...

Another important date was last week's graduation 'ceremony' (very minimalistic) for my Senegalese friend and foster son which I got to attend on the sidelines.

The first African graduate of this school of
mechanical engineering, but that was not mentioned.

Much to my own surprise I did not start crying. I thought I probably would, but I kept my wits together. What a ride it has been - and a practicum is around the corner, which might be an entry into a well-established firm of mechanical engineering, thanks to connections, we will see...

My son finished 10th grade (he is one of the students who profited from the virus and digital home schooling, at least in terms of grades) and immediately entered a bus that took him and his basketball team to Berlin where they are playing a small tournament. The parents are a bit worried about the infection situation there, which is not exactly optimal, but he was safely two weeks after his 2nd shot. Although ... no, I just hope they will be cautious and nothing will happen.

After my own exams (well, two thirds of it) I can safely start clearing up my desk, don't need to do all that studying anymore. But it is taking time to get back into a state of mind of some kind of normalcy. I find myself sitting around a lot, doing nothing, and the urge to get creative is still mostly focussed on 'making' rather than being truly creative. So I am finishing knitting projects to fulfill the self-imposed rule that I need to finish at least a part of what used to be approximately 6 or 7 unfinished knitting projects all over the house. I can tick of 2 - a pair of socks using up remnants (the pair in the top of the picture):

 

A sweater made from handspun yarn, 3-ply.

 

And I am getting closer to the finish line with this sweater for me. I think after that I am allowed to swatch a bit and make up my mind which of the zillion combinations of yarn and designs I have been pondering I will actually start.

 And spinning a wonderful silk fibre, which turns into a meditative activity that is keeping me occupied. But because the thread is very fine indeed it is taking a long of time, too.

 

I have been adding some more to the weaving piece on my design wall which I started for the SAQA regional zoom meeting. It is growing, but it is also still brewing. Not quite happy with the size right now. It will come.

Of course, this weekend I am thinking about the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, which I couldn't go to first because of the exams, and secondly because  of the virus and quarantine restrictions. I am hoping it will be possible again next year.

End of silence...?

So much has happened since I last wrote, and, unfortunately, not much of it conducive to art making. Life’s priorities have definitely changed since I started nursing training, and it is much more difficult to squeeze in time for art making than it used to be. The little moments I can find are easier filled by picking up a pair of knitting needles than whizzing into the studio and concentrating on what’s on the design wall. (Is there something on the design wall? Yes, there is:

)

So I turned back to sock knitting, wanting to use the remnants to make a blanket of remnants, but because the little balls of left-over from socks somehow still felt too big for getting used in the blanket, so insert another step: baby booties. Quickly made, and then the leftovers can be added to the bag for the blanket. 

If you would like to support the children's charity, send me a mail and
we can negotiate how you can come by 'your' pair of booties!

No, I am not expecting a baby, and no, I am not being made a grandmother yet (my 'baby' is 14...). But I thought it might be a possibility to give these booties away in exchange for a donation, which I will then pass on to the children’s charity for which I have donated before, when I ran the knit-along scarf. So right now I use little time windows for knitting the booties, and will try out different options where they might find interest and change hands in exchange for a donation. The idea for the baby booties came when I was doing a practicum session on the gyneacology ward – which was then followed by 10 days in the hospice. Quite the two opposites of the life span, and both very interesting. And I could collect the first two donations for 2 pairs of booties from a colleague in the hospice.

I have been a member of team “Berlin spinnt!” for the ravelry Tour de Fleece for the past weeks alongside the Tour de France, and  completed what I had set myself as a goal: I finished spinning the remainder of the fibre advent calendar from last year, and plied it completely. Now I have to decide on what I am going to make from these 480 grams of yarn. It is a colour gradient, so this decision is everything but easy!

And stuff has been happening on the political side, too, that I feel more and more disillusioned about the current state of political affairs in all aspects, which, too, is puts a  brake on creativity. But I am not going to talk about that. It is just too disheartening.

I have spent hours trying to clear up my studio, and at least the floor is visible again now. This morning I started packing my suitcase for South Africa. As I am taking the German part of the exhibition “Interchange – Threads connected” I need to plan carefully as to how to pack and what to take. I have booked an overweight suitcase, but not a second piece of lugggage, so wanted to find out how much room there is in the suitcase for my own things. I won’t have to take too many clothes as I am planning to rinse out things in the sink, and I am not going for a long trip anyway. But it will need just a little bit of planning and sorting as there is not much room left in the checked luggage suitcase, and everything else will have to go into hand luggage.

Meanwhile I am directing myself back to the sewing machine, and have dug out leftover blocks from a previous (long-ago!) project which I have been meaning to do something with for quite a while but just never had a good idea. Right now I am adding narrow lines and will see where it takes me.

As I was taking the individual blocks down to add the lines,
the wall was emptying, so now I have taken them all down
and put them on a stack.

Before I go to South Africa, though, I get to go to Birmingham, the well-loved Festival of Quilts is coming up, and I am really looking forward to that. Not a whole lot of time as I won't be there for long and the whole Saturday is taken up with the EQA meeting, but at least several very interesting exhibitions are there, and I have two quilts there, too.

White Walls

For those who do want to know: I did finish that UFO I wrote about in my latest post. However, it did not get included in the exhibit after all, because it just did not fit in well with all the other quilts, which are mostly from my series „Metamorphoses“ and „Play of Lines“. So some may think I might have taken it more easy beforehand, after all I should have known that it didn’t fit in with the others, being of a different style. But although I had been told in advance how many meters of hanging rails I would have available in total I had not really been sure how they were spread out throughout the house. So I wanted to have as many quilts available for hanging as possible. And now I am glad it is finished and I can move on to other things.

Which made me think about „white (design) walls“.

In German there is a saying that nothing is more frightening to a writer than a white sheet of paper on which the next story or text is supposed to be written. Supposedly a white sheet of paper can cause the worst of conditions in writers, a writer's block. Would that apply to a blank new document on a computer screen as well? The software for word processing is most likely going to give some color around that "white sheet of paper".

And in my case, as I work on a design wall in my studio, would that apply to the white or empty design wall, too?

Here is a picture of my design wall, empty as it was Monday morning:

my design wall - turned on the side
because I don't know why the computer keeps turning it
although the real picture is in the correct orientation... 

Though, to be honest, that wall is never totally empty as I pin stuff onto it on the sides – reminders, scraps, sketches, whatever. However, it was empty regarding ‚a piece of work in progress’. When you look at it, you can see that it isn’t really an empty white wall. First of all there is the line in the middle, caused by the fact that we put two pieces of material up and they had to meet somewhere. Secondly, the two pieces of fabric I used to cover the material differ slightly in make and shade. Thirdly, there are the screws that attach it to the wall. And the pins, waiting for new pieces of fabric. So it isn’t really an empty wall.

And as I have lots of ideas just waiting in my head for me to have enough time to set to work at them, it isn’t frightening either. In fact, I often wish it were a bigger white wall, with more space, perhaps even enough space to work on several pieces parallel.

I am eager to set to work again after all these busy weeks which did not give me much time at the sewing machin, working on art.

However, I started having a lookout for white walls outside. And found out that they, too, are hardly ever only white.

Here’s one that has a few little marks, although it is still pretty smooth.

The following two have slightly larger and larger marks on them.

Then there is one that looks almost pock-marked.

This one is dirty, obviously it has already met with quite a few things.

And this one has been mended.

And then, of course, there are white walls which are more than just a white wall, as this one, which is the wall of a stable in a nearby village.

So, come to think of it, there is really no need to even start getting scared of an empty or white wall, because there is almost always something there already. As there probably is in one’s store of ideas. There is bound to be one particular idea waiting to be pulled out and brought to life.