8, (7,6,5,4) 3…

 

The countdown is on. When I handed in my resignation at the end of August I knew the remaining four months at the practice would seem longish, but I also thought that two periods of vacation and the overall arrangement of working 3 days a week, usually all in a row following each other, would make it relatively feasible. The feisty brat, too, has held back in her unpleasant behavior. Not talking at all except for an occasional ‘hi’ is much preferrable to her usual bitchy tone of voice. Which even – albeit very briefly  ­ let me wonder whether it would have been possible to stay there if she had been behaving like that all the time. But thinking about that is nuisance, as there are indeed several other issues that contributed to the decision to move on. And the new arrangement just seems so much more pleasant now, with the lake looming as a daily possibility. 

 

The only thing is the fact that I am planning to commute by train, and given the current situation of the German Railway system, that may be a training in resilience. We will see.

Had a creative brainstorm meeting with my good friend Barbara on Wednesday last week, we met in Landshut in a café. Barbara gave me one of her quilts that is going to Abilmente with me in February, and we had a wonderful time talking about options, ideas, textile projects. When I returned home I immediately laid out the dimensions needed for the upcoming challenge for Ste. Marie-aux-Mines, and positioned a couple of pieces I had already made in other contexts but want to include in this piece. For example, my one and only piece for this year’s German Guild’s Sew Along “Meer Gilde” (Ocean Guild) will become a part of this piece. 

My island in the Sun....

 

Then Thursday was day 8 before goodbye from the practice, I had been feeling unwell all day but had gone to work nevertheless. When I came home after the early shift I returned my lunch to the sewer and took myself to bed. Friday a trip to the doctor gave me a 6 day-sick call, which cut down the remaining 7 days of work to three. The doctor suggested a corona test, which was negative, as was the second one a couple of days later, but so far I have been taking a very long time in getting better. I was able to do a little bit of stitching on Sunday, in deed working on the new piece for the Ste. Marie-aux-Mines competition with the challenge topic ‘ocean’. It gives me the opportunity to try to put into fabric an idea I have been hovering for a few months now.

Rather more pictorial than I usually work, but why not try something new?

 

But it’s been a roller coaster since, I haven’t been able to do much at all and am simply hanging out in bed, using a lot of tissues  and coughing. I don’t think I have felt as miserable as this since the corona infection in July 2022, but as the tests say negative, and the cough feels very different from the one back then, I hope that it really is just one of the other viral cough infections and this pandemic unpleasantry will pass me by. The remaining three days of work are up after Christmas, I hope to be able to recuperate until then. After all, solstice is over, starting today the days will be getting longer, that must have an influence on my physical well being!

Auctionary

 Life has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster lately. Not that much was happening, perhaps it is more the fact that not much is happening, the pandemic is still on, although numbers are going down right now, vaccination in Germany is a prime example of how-could-this-not-be-organized-better in this country of supposedly perfect organisation, and in a way everybody is going nuts. That includes me, probably some hormonal swings on the side... My God. Workouts in the open were rare because the weather was unfriendly. Very few moments in May looked like this.

Yesterday provided a pretty good harvest from my rhubarb plant, though, which is definitely a plus on the life side.

And my son and I went shopping to Munich this past week. We had recounted how house-bound he had been since he and I went to Berlin in the end of February 2020, he needed some clothes, infection numbers are going down so that some shops are open again, and both of us needed to get OUT OF THE HOUSE!!!!!!

I have rarely seen Marienplatz in Munich so empty...

We were successful in spending a good amount of money, as you can see in the number of bags and their fullness.

Of course I am trying to get enough studying in for my upcoming exams and yes, I will be VERY glad when this course is over and all I need to do is go to work and get on with my life! I am also trying to help my Senegalese friend with job applications, and perhaps that is stressing me more than my own situation. So I had got to the point where I thought, "well, this may be the first in many years in which I won't manage to get a piece for the Saqa Benefit Auction done". Because I thought deadline was June 1. But when I had sort of resigned myself to that, because I am also trying to draw lines of rejection when it is getting too much, I went to the website and checked - and lo and behold, it's the 30th. Well, I can do that. I have started, am on the facing now and will be done soon, a quick finish.

And then a mail came from Saqa, titled "Auctionaries", and at first I thought, what is that? But when I opened it I realized that it concerned me, too!

I am not sure how many years in a row I have entered and donated a piece for the Benefit Auction, but it must be over ten, because I think I remember that I saw a marker +10 or something like that next to my piece last year. And last year's sold for 750$. Admittedly, most others before sold much later in the auction, which means for a much lower price, none before had gone for more than 150, I think. Last year's was extremely powerful, I thought so myself, and yes, I am praising myself here.

"Love. Protect. Repeat." (text messages 22) 2020
12 x 12"

But I wasn't sure whether in total that would make it to over 2000? So after realizing that this mail concerned me, too, I clicked on the link, and there it is. A list with my name. I am an auctionary. Should I put that on my business cards now...?

Things on my table and my mind (Diary of recovery)

 

A couple of weeks ago Germany talked about the fifth anniversary of Chancellor Merkel’s famous words “Wir schaffen das!” (we can do that) which marked the beginning of one million refugees pouring into the country.  Although she  had only meant to take in the twenty-plus-something-thousands that were waiting at the Bukarest strain station at that time. The recent commemorations all tried to analyse what was right about that sentence or what Dr. Merkel had done wrong, give reasons for this and for that. But that's already over, by now we are in the midst of discussion rounds about the 30^th anniversary of German reunification – what went wrong, what was right, who was robbed of what, what was good in the GDR, are we really one nation, one people, … Germans seem to have a severe urge to discuss everything to shredded pieces these days, and in a negative way. Constantly journalists are pointing out what went wrong, what could have been done differently. It never seems to be worth to talk about the positive sides of things. How well many things went with one million refugees, many of which are working now. 

This attitude of talking things to death negatively is not a healthy way to deal with matters of importance, I think. But seems to be a very German approach, unfortunately. (I still think that Angela Merkel’s sentence was one of the best things she ever said, but the reaction from the then Bavarian Prime Minister and now Minister of Interior Affairs and Security spoiled it all, broke a barrier and made all the problems with right-wing extremists that we are experiencing now, possible to begin with. But I am back to trying to keep this a blog without real political issues. So no more on this.)

Definitely, these two anniversaries right on top of each other are a strong indicators, yet again, that time flies. (In a former life of mine, when I was still a linguist, this phrase would routinely draw up one of the insider jokes that live in specialist groups: “ Time flies  …. like an arrow. And fruit flies like a banana.”) I haven’t written a post in a while, but I have been continuously composing them in my mind indeed - and the longer I hadn’t written, the less feasible it seemed to come up with something coherent about stuff that is going on.

I have been to see my mother after several surgeries. I have had two wonderful weeks in a section in the hospital where I could indeed imagine myself working, if they have an opening starting next fall. I have had several rather unpleasant weeks in school, but I am counting down and there is not that much class time left to endure before the onset of exams coming July. Less than 80 days, in fact. And that is a positive things.

And I am working on this and on that. Quite a number of works in progress, each of which is biding their time, gets a bit of attention now and then and then has to recede to the background while others are being tended to. But the attention span is again on the shorter side, with worries growing again about increasing numbers of infections, demonstrations 'for liberty, against masks'... Who on earth can come up with such a stupid idea that a mask is meant to shut the population up?

The quilt I sent off on its round of entries (see post here) was already rejected once, Schweinfurth did not like it, and although I had thought it would not matter, I was a bit hurt and considered pulling it out of the circle. Originally, I had thought I would enter it for Quilt National, and Schweinfurth had just been an additional opportunity prior to that. “Forget entering”… just do my stuff as I like it and don’t bother to present it to the quilting world. But my good friend Barbara Lange just in time asked whether I had entered something for QN, and convinced me to give it a try by telling me that one quilt of hers had been rejected by the jury for St. Marie-aux-Mines but then been accepted for QN. And this conversation took place before the deadline had gone, I then really remembered to send off my entry, entry process worked easily without any problems and now the yellow scraps are waiting for their next verdict.

I have taught an online class twice in August, in the overall context of the Patchwork Gilde’s summer academy and have started preparing another on for November. It is not my favorite way of teaching, I must admit, and I am very glad that real teaching is coming up for me again in two weeks’ time. But the participants were so grateful and happy that things were happening, that they got to learn something new. Some of them even said that these new methods had given them more opportunities to participate in workshops or classed than they used to have before because they would have never been able to go to any of the ‘far away’ places where workshops are being held. They prefer having their fabrics close by, and even if a teacher out of a computer is different from a teacher on the premises, they were just glad to be sewing ‘in company’ and learning something as well. Which convinced me to pick another subject, aiming at a different group of expertise in quilting, and be a part of the ‘staff’ for another online-event the Gilde is planning for November.

I have also started ‘planning’ a quilt. 

 

Which definitely is not my usual mode of production. But as this post now is beginning to be a bit of a rambler, I think that will be a topic for another post in a few days when planning has progressed just a bit further.

I lost count.

As lockdown here has been relieved slightly, some school classes are beginning to go back and my son is asking my why he can’t stay in home schooling for the rest of his school years. This, although he still has several weeks before his class will be called back, in two-weekly intervals only, and so he will see the school building from the inside probably not much more than three weeks or so before summer vacation. Of course, the way our conversations go on a regular basis I know very well that home schooling him would never work in our combination of temperaments, and it is not allowed in Germany anyway. He has lost count of how many weeks he has not been in school. (I do worry about how his education is going to continue, though. Not clear on how it all will go on…)

I myself have lost count of the numbers of UFOs I have spread out through the house, the studio, my knitting baskets. Some of them old and rediscovered. But at least half a dozen of them pandemically new. Well, who knows how long this thing will laslt, perhaps they will not stay unfinished forever, perhaps not even for long? I know that sounds and is ambitious – but I can announce that I did indeed finish two of mine, and a quilting commission for a friend.

My first finish – and I mean complete finish, with a sleeve, and a title and a sign that states the title, is my contribution to the SAQA benefit auction. It is a woven quilt, made from silk strips I bought in Birmingham, it must have been two years ago or so, including two pieces of ribbons that had been splattered amidst the heap of debris on my working table. One of the ribbons has LOVE written on it repeatedly, and the other REPEAT. Add a fragment of a handmade mask as they have so quickly come to be all over, made from an old dish towel. And then earth and some continents in contour stitched over that – “Love. Protect. Repeat.” As there is text involved, I figured it should be part of my “text messages” series. Unfortunately I seem to have somehow lost count of how many pieces there are in the series by now. At least in my mind. So I guessed it might be number 20. Made the label.

But: As I am clearing up the working table in my studio I keep stumbling over reminiscences of “oh yeah, that one, too…” The disappearance of some of my data due to the loss of my laptop doesn’t help in this case, either – but lo and behold, I did save most of my pictures in October as a precaution (however, not the document data, stupid me). So when I figured out which of the four external hard drives I have accumulated indeed holds these files of pictures I got to look up the appropriate number. As it turns out, there is a number 20 already touring France, or, being lockdowned in France I should say these days. And as I have another text piece in the works, this one is 22. So do I redo the label, which is stitched on the sleeve… or what? Oh dear, the kind of problems we have these days!

Correct Number: 22
"Love. Protect. Repeat. (text messages 22)"

The other piece is the finished black and yellow top , but I will write about that when it comes off the longarm (which it is going on to later today). Certainly have to figure out which number that one is, too, because it has been so long since I added a piece to the series Play of Lines!