yet again, two more weeks of lockdown/restrictions

 Yesterday the Bavarian government announced two more weeks of regulations regarding opening of shops depending on numbers of infection within a district. Because some types of shops have taken their cases to court - why are hardware stores allowed to open, but not shoe stores? - it is getting stricter again for every type of store. The same with schools. Authorities keep saying schools are an important field for social interaction and that's why it is so important to keep students going there in shifts (half the class only, the other is at home doing assignments), with masks, overstressing teachers who have been working at their limit for so long, while many participants say digital teaching is more effective - and safer in terms of infectious process. It is getting very very tiresome. 

We are having another bout of winter with gusty winds and temperatures that make me shudder (ok, mostly due to the wind chill factor, but that is unpleasant indeed). I am not used to turning on the heater much anymore in April, but I have done so for the past days constantly. It snowed all day yesterday, although it didn't settle on the ground. I am worried about my little pohutukawa tree, a reminiscence of my New Zealand travels (although I bought it here), which returned from its winter storage almost four weeks ago.

So far it is still looking ok, but I do hope it warms up quickly.

 

On the other hand, my field of sunflowers is putting up an amazing speed of sprouting, I took these little fellows inside the house. 

I had a lovely conversation with the pixeladies on zoom yesterday. I have known them personally since they had come to Ste. Marie-aux-Mines for one of the EPM meetings way back then when we were still traveling and I want to include a section on their online teaching in an article I am writing for the German Patchwork Guild's magazine. Talking to them was so much fun and gave me a bit of a boost, emotionally. It made me wonder why I haven't done that more often, now that everybody is doing zoom-casts all the time. I have joined in with some of the regional SAQA meetings for SAQA Europe/Middle East, but they tend to be on Monday nights when I have my piano lesson, and so I can't join in often. This whole covid thing is just wearing me down - and I find it hard to concentrate on creativity and mindfulness for myself. Although I try.

During this chat with Kris and Deb I realized that the #gildemodernburgoyne design-a-thon I have started for the Guild is perhaps not the type of creativity I usually strive for. But it also is a type of creativity, albeit it lacks the haptic aspect that is so important when handling fabric. Of course, ideally, it would lead to a design and a plan that will be executed, getting me back to the fabric. (However, at that stage, the creativity part for me would be mostly finished as I am not really somebody who works from plans.) But I have made a quilt with that pattern - in my own un-planned manner, and wasn't exactly considering making another one ... we will see.

Yet I have been continuing on the design path, and yesterday, in between two night shifts at the hospital, I published my day 10 on the Guild's website forum. As I had said, I wanted to try out the block put onto a corner, and at first I stuck with the rainbow coloring. Here I will present a selection of the various design options I came up with. In this first one, the sashing between the blocks is still relatively broad. The effect of the circle in the interior block gets lost, and the lines of squares appear to be much more prominent than in the other orientation. I did not spend time adapting colors of the squares in the nine-patches between the blocks and the sashing sections, but that would certainly increase the overall unity of the rainbow coloring, pulling the blocks together.

Here, width of sashing was reduced, which results in a more prominent effect of the lines. Blocks between sashing and blocks are four patches.

I also tried a version with colored sashing, taking up the rainbow hues, in both a wide and a narrow sashing.

There were several other versions I tried, and the most surprising one happened when I tried to 'go darker' in the inner block. Probably I had chosen two different hues in the rectangles because when I tried to change their color with 'swap color', this is what happened.

Saved is as a "whoops!" and am kind of in love with it.

What kind of film is this?

 A lot of life is going on these days, and it leaves little time to ponder what would be worth writing about. Only little time for stitching as such, anyway.

And then so many things happening that bother me. I received my second dose of vaccine on Friday, which in itself is a very good thing and I am immensely grateful for, despite all the vagaries about the vaccines as such, the mode of distribution in Germany / Europe / less developed countries, how the pharmaceutic corporations are using it to manifest and milk their power, and instances of corruption in politicians connected with face masks blablabla. 

 

I had received the shot around 2 p.m., my arm started hurting later that afternoon, getting bad and worse, and then I went to sleep at 8 p.m. And slept. and slept. and slept. Except for two minor trips to the lavatory, a drink of water and a few words with my husband I was not able to do anything on Saturday, I slept and slept and slept. Until way into Sunday morning. By Sunday noon I was pretty much my old self again, if a bit slowed down still. But I did feel somewhat like a Rippa van Winkle, especially when looking through the paper, which, at that point was only yesterday’s paper, but sported news that seemed to tell me that the world was really crumbling in its mindset, as if my sleep interval had made my perception to it all even more acute.

Or has the virus dug deeper into all our brains and is by now really getting to our core? Life seems to be getting stranger and stranger, and some things I see hurt me more and more. One example: the current head of the grouping calling itself the Christian Democratic Values Union, a rather right-oriented section within the Christian Democratic Party (definitely not a party on the liberal spectrum of the political scene – they are conservative! they promote conservative values!) announced he would not be available for another term when a new head would be elected within a couple of months, because of the “dangerously left-oriented turn that Christian Democratic Policies have taken”. Excuse me? I have a very hard time understanding where left-orientation can be found or even suspected in Merkel’s or anybody from the CDU’s ranks politics. It felt like being in the wrong film. That’s when I first thought about how Rip van Winkle must have felt. And I had only been gone for a day. Made me wonder, too, how people who are recovering from a coma, or whatever kind of longish sedation, feel like, when they are returning back to real life. And then I began thinking about Sleeping Beauty and the depiction of her waking up after her hundred years of sleep. Being ‘kissed awake’, and simply as that she is whisked off by the prince, I mean, did he ask her whether that was what she wanted? But to be honest – I did not follow this thought through. I had applied for a job at the University of the Arts in Berlin earlier this year, as the HR person for Equal Opportunities, and while simply the process off applying, imagining myself back in an academic environment, how it would be and what it would mean to me living in a city like Berlin did me very good, the fact that I wasn’t even invited for an interview really pissed me off. However, I don’t approve of the way political movements are now trying to interfere with spelling ‘regulations’ that are supposed to show a more inclusive attitude towards underprivileged sections of society. I don’t think it will work through political pressure, these regulations will only split society even further – so in the end I am a bit relieved that I did not get that job and would have had to be at the forefront of this issue. Where my stand probably wouldn’t have been received well.

I am rambling on, mostly because I don’t have a lot to show. I did start a sunflower field and a tomato farm, though!

 

But there is something interesting going on. For almost two weeks now I have been posting design options for the Burgoyne Surrounded block on the Patchwork Gilde Deutschland’s website, members area. Which is turning into an adventure in designing for me. I am slowly learning tricks and options of EQ8 that way and have come up with some really fun layouts.

Here are a few recent highlights from the last two posts.

 

 

As I am not exactly sure whether this activity is actually finding any response within the Guild’s community (nobody except the web editor has left a comment in the comment area yet). It has received some nice comments on Instagram when I post on my personal account, whereas the members forum is open only to members, so I have decided to take at least some of the most exciting designs (in my opinion) that I come up with to a wider public. Be prepared to see a few more of these here during the month of April. One thing I will try to do is to improve the quality of the pictures, perhaps saving them in a different size will also make them a bit more catchy.

When life takes over...

One of the blogs I follow is the one written by Dena Crain. I admit that especially her series on Time saving for quilters seemed daunting at times, at least to me. I am just not the type of person who clears up everything when stopping to work, nor covers her completely spare work table with a piece of cloth when leaving the room! 

Nor do I usually cover my machine when I turn it off. Perhaps that’s not only lazy, but a mistake that I don’t do that – but perhaps life in Kenya is simply much more dusty than life in southern Germany? I also receive the newsletter for Dena’s online teaching resource, QuiltEdOnline, and the headline of the most recent post caught my attention as it read “When life gets in the way”.

I had used that phrase myself as an excuse during my online workshop with Lisa Call once, when I had not had enough time to finish the assignments because a friend passed away. And sometimes I feel like that right now – although I would rephrase the sentence into “When life takes over” for what I am experiencing these days. To me, these slightly different expressions do refer to not only slightly different situations. Dena’s situation with her husband being seriously ill, a helicopter evacuation and two weeks in hospital must have been much more dramatic than anything I am experiencing, and perhaps it is not exactly right to draw parallels. Nobody is seriously sick in my family, we are not experiencing financial or any other kind of trouble – and yet life has decided to take over and quilting time has become very scarce. (I did manage to put in several hours this week, though - there is a deadline coming up...)

Voluntary work with refugees is much more time consuming than one thinks ahead of time. And much more rewarding. It is usually slightly more difficult to solve a problem than expected. And always more gratifying to have been able to help.

And it takes a lot of time away from quilting. Even when I try to have ‘one day without refugees’ that really only means I won’t have anybody coming for a German lesson. I will still write several e-mails, have several telephone conversations about refugee issues. Quilting time has become very precious. Life has taken over.

But I can ask other members of our network to take somebody to the doctor, too, it does not always have to be me who is driving. And slowly I am re-claiming time slots for myself, my family.

One of the slots was my birthday party – in which all of the refugees appeared as welcome guests, three of them with their special donation of fantastic cooking skills. They had worked all day, preparing Syrian kebab, putting it onto the fire. I was not allowed to do anything.

Fire experts getting the fire going look the
same all over the world, don't they?

It was a wonderful day – delicious food – I had guests from 7 different countries – and I must say, if I had known how much fun it can be to celebrate a fiftieth birthday, I would have done so long ago already.

Musings on Life (and Age)

Next week I will turn 50. It feels just a little bit like Old Age is creeping up on me! Although my good friend Margrit just told me the other day that 65 is when the real challenge begins. And I doubt I will feel a whole lot differently when it’s no longer 49, but a five in the beginning.

When I turned 24 I had a really serious time about that change. But it was also one of occasions when I actually celebrated – I was a teaching assistant at Holy Cross College at that time, mostly campus bound, and invited a few friends out to dinner. This time I am not afraid, although a couple of times I have jokingly referred to myself as ‘aging’. Indeed – my eyesight is changing faster than the insurance company is willing to pay for a new set of glasses. Last time they were willing to pay I was still too vain to go for bifocals, just got myself a new set of glasses for driving. Now my reading abilities have gone down further – and solely due to eye issues, nothing mental yet! -  so I had to get myself some “reading glasses”. And old age immediately struck in that I in those three weeks since I got this extra pair of glasses I have already had several days when I did not exactly know where to locate at least one pair of the three that I am juggling with now. 

Glasses for driving

The new pair of 'reading glasses'

The old pair which is not right anymore,
but has to substitute when I can't find the
ones with the black rim, or when I am
trying to play the piano early in the morning...

The one I needed to change to always was somewhere else than where I thought I had left it. Of course, I could consider this a way of ‘brain jogging’, appropriate for seniors. If it hadn’t been my husband’s brain who finally found them...

Certainly, turning 50 does not feel in any way as I expected it to back then when I turned 24. Just about at that time I first met a college teacher through taking a class from her who, in her position as a university teacher, to me seemed – well, not exactly elderly, but certainly she must have been much older than I was! (She was 36, or 37  at the most.) We got to be friends over the years, stayed in touch – and by now I am about 15 years older than she was when we first met, whereas she just retired from teaching last year.

Talking to the young people from Syria whom I have spent a lot of time with lately, I must admit that I think I don’t feel much older than them on the inside – but I am pretty sure they look on me similarly as I did onto that teacher of mine. (If not 'worse', because I could be their mother, and although they haven’t told me, I am pretty sure their mothers are younger than I am.) And then a now 10-year-old boy in the house, who is definitely entering puberty and he, too, a taurus, and arguments aren’t getting easier or less frequent. He has a strong opinion, and a good command of language in terms of argumentation... So at least 50 is not going to be boring, which I once thought it might be. After all, most of the interesting things in life will have happened by that time, won’t they? But statistics say I have at least another 30 years ahead of me. Let’s see what those years bring. Can’t all of them be boring!

Musings on life (and loss)

Last Sunday my family and I set out to visit my parents. I packed a small suitcase with the clothes needed for a two-night-stay, and a few items to keep me busy during the several-hours-train-ride.

This blue suitcase had been with me since a trip to Vancouver many years ago when my friend Maike got married and my carry-on bag gave out just as I was arriving at the airport. It had been to places, but it was still in pretty good condition and the perfect size for shorter trips like this. This little suitcase was not one that I particularly cared about, it was just a practical suitcase. But it was stolen on this trip, straight away from the streetcar, without either of us three travelers noticing anything.

The monetary value of the items in there is not really high, as most of the items were used, every-day items, and some had been with me for several years, too. The only items that I could put a price on pretty exactly must have been the new curcular knitting needle which I had bought just last Saturday for a knitting project (€ 5,75) and a brandnew Spanish dictionary (€ 29,95) which I bought a couple of weeks ago. But in the suitcase was a wooden backgammon set which I really liked, made of cedar wood, with a very nice smell when you open it. (I love playing backgammon, and much prefer ‘real’ encounters with real people compared to games on the smartphone, where the phone always has the double throws and games never seem fair.) And a couple of balls of not exactly cheap woolen yarn for that knitting project. Three different charging devices for the various electronic pieces of equipment one carries these days. All of the electronic devices themselves were in my backpack, they were not lost. (My computer, whit LOTS of photos, all my writings etc., the phone, the camera.) And a hand-bound book made by a friend who is very ill, and which I had been using as a diary since January. Not a whole lot of monetary value, but if you compile the cost of re-aqcuisition, it adds up, too. And the emotional value is not to be measured in any way, either, even if it seems stupid to grieve for a little set of backgammon.

The police officer whom I talked to when I went to the police said I should be grateful that all my documents were with me, no money stolen. Be grateful when you had things stolen from you? Somehow this seems a strange way of thinking.

Nothing in there is of any value for the thieves. They will throw everything away. And I would have liked to use these items for many years to come. What a waste. What a stupid way to hurt people. What a superfluous experience to have to go to.

But then – is it worth grieving for these little items, as dear as they might have been? Life is strange.