High Noon Abstract in May

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What's up now?

It's the end of the month, nearly, and I am dyeing the new collection of the fabric club. Which brought a bit of sink art:

We have started a 3000-piece-puzzle of a World Map, and even my husband is joining in - he hates puzzles, but he 'wants to have the table back'! Motivation is everything you need...

I put up a practice piece on the Longarm. That was easy enough.

But getting used to each other is not quite as easy as I had hoped. For one thing, it is leaving out stitches, which I really don't fancy, and the soon-to-come-instructor could not explain away via the telephone yet:

I'll just have to try different kinds of threads etc. Patience!
Meanwhile my 10-year-old has discovered the fun of diving from a 10-m-diving board.

He had been so fascinated with divers already when he was three and four that I had thought he would do the 10m just after starting school. So I guess I must be happy he waited for so long...

Final steps in putting up the machine

... took just a bit longer than planned, mainly because my husband's job duties and my various activities somehow didn't match well over the weekend so that we could have continued together.
Plus we had a music street festival in our town, including a Sunday afternoon open air picknick on the central square. All the members of the volunteer network for the refugees, and, of course, the refugees, came to share in the celebration, we had to add more and more tables - in the end it was the longest and most international table on the entire square.

Such a nice afternoon! I think it must have been one of the nicest afternoons I have had in this town, and we have lived here for 10 years now!

In the evening, finally, my husband and I got it all together. Pictues of the stages of the setup can be seen here, this is the final portrait of the supporting quilter husband, pretending at quilting:

And this the main character of the play:

Hopefully I can load a practising piece tomorrow...

It's a ... longarm!

Last August at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham I spent a couple of hours testing a longarm machine.

First negotiations with Nate Arnesen from Handiquilter there were continued in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines, then transferred to the German section. In Germany we have a saying "Gut Ding will Weile haben" - good things take their time. So after just slightly over nine months later - here is the latest development in our household. The space:

The arrival:

The boxes:

Which were then carried dupstairs by one of the Syrians.
First stages of unpacking:

First assembly steps completed:

More and more empty boxes:

The supporting quilter husband at work, so happy that he got to use the little electric screw driver he had bought a couple of years ago:

And this is the current stage - the table is complete.

It's a tight fit... we will have a harder time getting to our books! And tomorrow we will put up the machine.

What's Up

Yesterday I finished stitching the top which I am preparing for the challenge in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines. Then I dissolved the stabiliser on which I had done the stitching.

Here is a mini-detail as it appeared on the line:

By now it has been through the wash once more, and I can start on the quilting. Which will still be done on the Bernina, not yet on the longarm. I will begin with that after I return from Karlsruhe. (The longarm machine is scheduled to arrive on Wednesday.) In preparation for the Nadelwelt Karlsruhe, where I am going tomorrow, I spent some time during the last days overdyeing (too) light fabrics which seemed to have colors that did not really sell, and dyeing a few more meters extra. And I was surprised at the impressive stack of additional colours I ended up with.

Then I dreaded having to load the car, which is always a lengthy procedure of carrying the boxes, then the wooden stacks etc, and by the end I am very tired, sweaty and completely crabby. Then I had the brilliant idea of making use of my brand new app, sent a message to the Syrians, and at half past three three strong young men appeared on my doorstep. Whithin less than a quarter of an hour everything had been whizzed down the stairs, the car packed except for the last tidbits, and I did not have to carry one single box. And they will help me unload on Monday after my return, too. Too bad I can't take them with me to Karlsruhe (no room in the car!) - so there I will have to do all the schlepping alone. But no stairs to cover there.

If you are a member of the German Patchworkgilde and can present a membership card at the stall, you will receive a 5% discount on your purchases. Find me at C 3.5!

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!