Too many temptations!

There are many things on my plate right now. Perhaps a few too many, to be honest. And yet I feel the lure of temptations over and over again, to start yet another project. It takes a lot of strength and energy to resist these temptations, to say ‘no’ and concentrate on things that need to be finished, or finally get around to making real projects I have been planning for a while already.

No, it is not a good idea to sign up for a 4-meeting online course at weird times due to the person offering the class living in a completely different time zone. (For one thing, I would have to negotiate about my work schedule and make sure I could really attend those sessions.) No, I don’t need another set of rather expensive plastic templates for a difficult pattern, thank you, although I like the pattern that could be made with them. (That decision concerns template set no.3, I did cave in with one ruler that I had sent from the US and paid dearly customs fees for, 

The HuRTy by Latifah Saafir, my newest posession.

Precuttings that I am using instead of sew-on-sew-off squares
right now, which will result in another quilt that sewed itself,
in due time. That's the intention, at least.

 

and another set is being brought to Germany from Australia via personal carrier, my many-years-pen-pal’s daughter who has just arrived here for a year abroad during her university studies and will use the set as incentive for her first trip to a German post office one of these days.)

And yet I have to admit that I did commit for one thing and sort of committed for another. The first one I haven’t started on – it’s the Swiss Guilds “Round Bobbin”, for which I have received the bobbin, and the list of prompts, and even THOUGHT about an idea what to do for the first one, ‘paper’. 

 

The other, ‘sort of committed’ is that I am participating in the German Guild’s Sew-Along 

 

which started recently, with the topic of Sea/Ocean, combined with the Alphabet. I did make a personalized version of the first block, an island. 

I won’t make all blocks suggested, as they seem to be rather appliqué-oriented and I am not much into that technique. However, I am planning to substitute for those I omit by making other ocean-related blocks. I may even make some of the letters, but not sure about that yet. The sew-along is free for anyone to participate – if you are quick. For one week each pattern will be freely available on the Patchworkgilde’s website here. After that the pattern is moved to the members-only-section and you would have to be a member to access it. (Instructions in German.)

I am happy that I could send off ‘Mellowed Yellow’ three weeks ago, as it got juried into the German Guild’s Tri-Annual Show “Tradition bis Moderne”. I had entered two different quilts, and out of the two I prefer that Mellowed Yellow got chosen. The show will open in April in Dinkelsbühl, Germany, where it will be on display throughout and beyond this year’s AGM and Patchworktage. After that it will travel through several German towns for the next two years, and it will be shown at EPM in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines in September. 

Mellowed Yellow, started during Corona lockdown to keep my sanity...

 

One thing on my mind that is not strictly quilt-related is the fact that my ‘baby’ will turn 18 in the beginning of May. He has grown very tall and is going to graduate from High School in June (although I sometimes fear that his chilling attitude is just a little bit too chilling, but…) Of course, in a way that is quilt-related, too. I have been meaning to make him a grown-up quilt for his birthday, to substitute for the little-boy-colors one he himself did the layout for several years ago. I have started cutting the new one,

 

including some fabric I had printed from a picture of a notebook page with his little-boy-handwriting I found amongst some discards along the way. 

But if I do want to present him with at least the finished top I better get to work on this one seriously. No time to give in to temptations of various kinds! How good that I have reduced my work load and will only be working three days a week starting in April.

Paying dearly.

 The past few days I have spent a lot of time on our terrace, either resting (sometimes reading) in the hammock, or sitting in the shade of the magnolia tree, spinning along with the Tour de Fleece/France. I look like I have been on holiday and not like I have been recuperating. I actually did get quite a bit of spinning done, it's not even the second day of rest on the tour 

 

Sometimes I have the live reporting on the tablet on,
but most of the time I don't bother as I am not really
interested in the biking event. I just like the spinning event.

and I have spun far more than half of the whole batch of fibers I started out with, and at that point I wasn't expecting to get much done. My goal when I set out was 'spin a little bit every day'.

The cough is slowly getting easier, but thanks to my kind of job I had the 'pleasure' of being subjected to a second pcr test, after five days of quarantine, which was still positive. So I get to stay home a few more days. What a perfect way to start a new job! My boss is going to love it....

Personally, I think it is completely right to be tested again, but current German regulations are different for 'just anybody' and for people working in health care jobs, and that really upsets me. There must be many more people out there who are still positive after 5 days of quarantine, and they just get to leave the house, return to their normal life - thus endangering everybody whom they meet on the street, because mask wearing is not mandatory anymore either. Health care workers, however, get tested a second time, have to stay home longer - and when back at their job, they face the danger that all the other people are posing form them while doing their job. I don't think this is fair. And it certainly can't be what health experts would recommend. But... I wasn't involved in any of these decisions. I know I would not be good out there working all day in my current state, but I feel so much better that I can take the active decision to enjoy these unfairly allotted free days. Of course, there is still more spinning waiting for me, but it won't be the only fiber activity I will turn to.

Spinning a fiber sample pack from Ashford, using all the
colors that are still in the box according to a pre-determined
time scheme, two threads will be from this pack, a third
thread to neutralize will be gray with some silk carded
in to soften the original merino. In the end I will have A LOT of
this yarn...

 

As a little treat to myself, at the beginning of my quarantine I gave in to a craving I had felt for a little while. On Instagram I follow @visible_creative_mending, and for a while I had been considering getting her book on techniques of meding. Of course, I know how to mend, dating back to my grandmother's teaching and my mother's book of handicrafts from way back then (the first edition came out in 1930, although my mother's copy is from 1954 - perhaps it would be an interesting topic for a research paper how that book changed during its lifespan from the beginning through the years of Nazi-regime in Germany, and how it was used to influence girls' lives... but that is just a thought on the side, and I would rather just make and stitch instead of following up on it).

 

I also have Rodabaugh's book which I bookreviewed for the Guild's magazine a few years ago. 

 

And I have been showing some of the mends I do, so this was a mere fancy to treat myself during illness. As a matter of fact, I had been through the first steps of ordering in the online shop, up to the moment when shipping costs came up and I was confronted with another of those unpleasant side effects of Brexit. For one thing, a price of £28,00 is, I think, quite costly for a book like this. But add to that another £ 11 for shipping... at first, I balked at that and was sensible and told myself 'that is quite a lot of money for something you basically know how to do', and refrained. But, with illness messing up my thinking I did go ahead and order it.

 

Yesterday it arrived. Not only is it small-ish, definitely small for a price like that, but German post has once again given me the pleasure of 'treating it through customs' (worth €3.45), and for the 'lending' of this the postal service adds a service fee of €6,37 or something like that. So I had to pay an almost extra €10 to even lay hand on this... I do call that paying dearly for a lack of resistance to temptation. 

It looks like a nice enough book, but definitely not worth that much. Hopefully I will be more careful before ever ordering anything again that will arrive from outside EU borders.

Succumbed.

 

After two and a half years of ever prolonged lockdown periods, wearing face masks either all over the place, but definitely at work all the time, three shots of vaccination, being prudent and careful, months on end of social distancing and lack of contacts, a deeply felt lack of cultural input because so much wasn’t possible, recently offending people by single-handedly (excuse the pun) trying to change the unhygienic habit of hand-shakes as a greeting the virus has caught up with me. I sort of was expecting to catch it at some point sooner or later, and I am relieved that it happened now, and not a day before we are planning to go on vacation in August. But...

Not sure whether I got it from that colleague whom I hugged (without a mask) when saying good-bye at the OR (but the scratchy throat started that evening right away and she was reported sick only a few days later, so perhaps she caught it from me?) The unfortunate part of it all is that I had only four days at the new job before I was tested positive, which, of course, is not exactly what an employer wants from a new employee. But what’s there to do in a pandemic?

The test result had come in on Saturday, and the weekend was terrible, because I did not have any medication to deal with the coughing. That has changed, and at least I am not coughing my guts out anymore. Weakly lying in the hammock for long stretches of time, 

 

but every once in a while I gather enough strength to spin along with the #tourdefleece2022. 

Sometimes I spin along as they ride, although, to be honest,
my interest in the tour as such is minor.

 I am spinning a fine thread, so the project will take a while, but I have spun almost 50% of the sample pack I started out with. In the end, I will need a thrid thread, though, to make it a good 3-ply, I will be working on this longer than the tour, even though I plan to spin along until the end of the month, including the Tour des Femmes as well.

That’s not too exhausting. Thinking hasn’t been possible, but perhaps the next few days will show a bit of improvement.

I watch my flock of chickens, 

This is 2/5ths of the flock.

 

look up at the leaves of the magnolia 

 

and wait for the world, and my cough, to improve.