Settling in, slowly, via miniatures

 

A little over a month ago I moved into our new house. The move as such was quick – the movers came, packed the van, drove over, unpacked and were gone again in just three and a half hours. Ever since then I have been unpacking (that’s finished), trying to establish some sort of order (not yet finished), and trying to adapt (by far not finished!). It’s not easy to get accustomed to being a house owner, living in a house that is rather different from what you imagined your ‘if I ever buy a house’-type to be, and being responsible for a garden that looks completely different from what the garden of your dreams would look like. It will take a while.

The day after the move I got into the car and went off to participate in a workshop by Amy Pabst at Grit’s Life near Uelzen. It had been a rather spontaneous sign-up before I knew the date when the movers would come, so it wasn’t really a convenient time. But I had been smart and separated all the materials I needed for the workshop, easily accessible, easy to pack into the car, and a well-deserved respite in the midst of chaos.

I have admired Amy Pabst’s miniature log cabin and pineapple quilts at quiltfestival in Houston and at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, and I had been planning to interview her for the Patchwork Gilde’s magazine issue “Log Cabin” that is coming up next year. So when I read that she was coming to teach in Northern Germany, not too far away from where I now live, I didn’t hesitate and signed up immediately.

 

I was joined by my friend Vanessa with whom I had already gone to a workshop with Jenny Hanes last year (and never wrote about it, because of all the things that were going on). 

 

We may turn this into a tradition, because once may be a coincidence, twice is a repetition, and it only takes one more time to make it a regular, a tradition… we will see.

So we were signed up for a one-day workshop of mini pineapple, and we had fun. I must admit – I hate foundation paper piecing, and it was a bit strange that I would sign up for this workshop. But to my undiluted joy we found out that Amy’s technique excludes exactly that part of foundation piecing that has always been my most hated part: the removal of the foundation material.

We started with a 3-inch-block, went smaller with a 2-inch-block and then ended up attempting a 1-inch-block.

 

3 pineapple blocks in one day.

But – I do like it. It’s perversely small. 

 

Anything but sustainable, because there is a lot of cut-off fabric when you cut back the seam allowances after adding another log. And yet, it touches something in my ‘trying to get smaller’ tendency. So I have sat down to construct a 1 ½ inch foundation pineapple pattern with EQ8 (yes, that knowledge needs to be refreshed!) and have started sewing small blocks. 

 

At present I am leaving off the final corner pieces, telling myself they will be added when a bit more of a design will be recognizable. To be continued…

Retreat, sort of

My interlude is drawing to an end, this coming Friday I will begin the new job. Weeks of leisure are coming to a close, and this is just a bit sad. I was getting used to having time to travel, sew, do this and that. But on the other hand it will be nice to reap the harvest of the past three harrowing years in form of a real job, so I supposed it will all be well.

At least the leisure time was rounded off with a very nice 2-day workshop in my favorite place to teach, the Petersberg Catholic Community College to the west of Dachau. Two days of 16 happy women sewing, we didn’t really stick to the ‘topic’ as had been announced in the catalogue, but very quickly everyone started working on various projects they had brought along. Several many-years-in-the-making items were finished, we had banned conversations about the pandemic, and everybody was happy.

 

My friend Regine and I stayed on for another three nights. We transferred the sewing machines, design walls and irons to our ‘family room’, which offered enough space for sewing. And we kept enjoying the perfectly timed meal times supplying us with a more than sufficient amount of food, no worries about preparing, cleaning up etc. A bit of walking in the morning, including the sunrise.

 

Twice we could sit out on the balcony in the sunshine in the afternoons, 

 

only today it has turned so cool that we must inadvertently admit that fall is on its way, and no sunshine either.

I had not brought any sewing for art, but simply for sewing for fun, and managed to start and finish the blocks for this second round using my templates for the ‘Free Wheeling Single Girl Ring’ by Denyse Schmidt. This time using up leftover workshop samples and some fabrics on which I had at some point tried out  shibori techniques.

 

It makes for a more unified impression than on the first attempt when I was using leftovers for the ring and the background fabrics. There is still a bit of work to do, squaring up and then sewing it all together, but I am happy with the result so far, so cheerful. Iris called it 'the pool party', with all these life-saving rings floating around. I like the image!

I also finally brought out the small Elna machine I had bought a few months ago – I am ashamed to admit I had not tried it yet. 

 

It has a perfect ¼ inch seam allowance and sews very nicely, I am very pleased. This is going to be my future workshop machine and I will have to see what to do with the wonderful Bernina 930 I have. (Which is my all-time favorite machine ever, but which has the serious drawback that it is an American machine and therefore always needs to be connected to a converter, which makes for heavy lugging around.) I used it to try out a ruler I acquired in August for some curved piecing, and it gave me a new idea for a next workshop, when the new catalogue needs to go to print and I have to come up with a title.

 

please ignore the imperfect center, this was just a sample,
figuring things out that were not given in the instructions that
came with the ruler

So we will pass one more leisurely afternoon here, with a visit from Regine's daughter tonight, and then tomorrow I am heading back home, for a new phase in life beginning on Friday.

An eerie little respite...

 

For months on end everything has been closed, no workshops or gatherings or even visits with more than one other person possible. Then it seemed as if numbers were going down, a new regulation for adult education centers was announced (my son was alternately going back to school, too) – and the workshop at my usual retreat place Petersberg, north-east of Munich, scheduled for this past weekend, was happening. Only a third of the people who had originally signed up actually committed to coming under the strict hygienic regulations posed by the administration, but the director nevertheless decided that it would be ‘on’.

At first I had been sceptical whether I wanted this to happen, or did I want to go – it meant a severe cut in revenue, after all, and as I had been expecting it to be canceled I had thought about other things to do for the weekend (i.e. finally get serious about studying for my upcoming exams). But after a number of unpleasant experiences last week I was happy enough to get out when time came around, packed my car, and took off.

 

A bit of dramatic sky on the way there – we have been having rather cold temperatures with April-kind-of-weather. And then we were the only group, eight people, in a house where normally there can be up to eighty people. It felt a bit eerie indeed. Eight small peas in a large pod...

But we were determined to make the best of it. I had posited that we talk about anything expect the Big C thing, and although in a few instances little references happened, everybody in the group was eager to check everybody else. We had a lovely weekend sewing, chatting, trying out stuff. It wasn’t a workshop, because we felt that the others who didn’t come but still somehow belong to the group (it’s a rather consistent pool of participants who regularly come to the gatherings) shouldn’t be left out completely. They actually 'joined' us twice for brief zoom interactions.

I enlisted everybody present to make one example of the block ‘burgoyne surrounded’, which is the topic of the current sew along I am hosting for the German Guild, and we came up with a nice selection of examples. 

 

Iris tried an inversion with two colours.

Gina tried her hand on the smaller version
where the small squares measure 1/2 inch only.

A display of (most of) the examples made by the group
(a portion of the light blue ones in the right upper hand corner
I had already made at home and brought with me, I
would not have been able to make that many, they do take time...)

Some of them I may use for further explorations of the pattern in the next few weeks. For posting on social media we even dared take a photo for which we dropped our masks briefly after having set it all up in an almost socially distanced array.

 

Numbers of infection are on the rise again, and the house may have to close down again perhaps day after tomorrow. So this was a strange little heavenly retreat. But it gave a feeling of almost normal, at least until the moment when we had to leave again Sunday afternoon.