One thing off my back!

One of the many things I have been doing lately and that has kept me rather busy in combination with all the other things is to study for a Spanish exam. I have been studying Spanish with a private teacher for over four years now. At first we were three ladies going to her class together, then one lost her husband and dropped out shortly after, and the other one kept going with me for about another 9 months. Since then I have been going by myself, sometimes studying more, sometimes studying less. In a desperate attempt to get me to study more my teacher at some point suggested I should take the A2-level exam. Which I put off for a while, but we started using a different book to prepare me for the exam, and finally I plunged in and said I want this over with, so I signed up. Last Friday was the big day, I had been totally stressed out the weeks before because I still could not put aside enough time to study and was absolutely sure I would fail. My wonderful teacher had prepared me very well, though, and given me a few hints as to how to approach those standardized processes of taking such an exam. Of course, I should know, because I teach a language as a foreign language myself… but it is totally different when you are on the other side. In any case, I think I passed, although it will be a while before we get the results as the exams will be corrected in Salamanca.

After the written part of the exam I had to breach a few hours and went shopping, after the oral part a friend came and picked me up and we went for a coffee before I took the train back home. Amazing how much of a relief it is to have that thing off my back! I feel almost relaxed, although there are still many other things going on, I have to pack my bags to leave for France tomorrow, … I will have to decide how to continue with my Spanish. Of course I want to go on, and my dream is to go to Spain for a few weeks, perhaps a language class first, and then woofing, if possible, to actually use it in the real Spanish environment. But I am not certain I will take another exam like that. My friend Kathy rightly asked ‘so what is this credential going to give you?’, and I could not give a satisfying answer. I probably won’t need it to apply for a job anymore, nor do I need to demonstrate that I can do it. It was an interesting experience, though. Of course, I don’t know yet for real whether I passed.

So my thoughts have turned towards preparing the piece I will do at the Art Symposium in May. I have used two of the fabrics I printed when I was staying with Chrisse Seager in January. They are related in that one was the dropcloth under the other and I simply ripped them apart, inserted them into each other and have now prepared a piece that is large enough to get a finished piece of approx. 1,60 in width. 

I am talking to people who will do some of the handwriting that I will then transfer onto the fabric. 

Pragmatic way of determining the actual size of the area in which I will stich:
ironing creases, and these will then be the edges between which I will fold,
to finalize the size of segments

And I have taken decisions as to orientation and arrangement of the text. At first I thought it would be only 12 segments, but this morning I decided it will have to be 16. 

12 ...?

or 16?

And I realized that there is not a whole lot of time left before the beginning of the symposium. I will need to work well ahead because even a whole week of intensive work on site might not be enough time to get everything done there.

Fair and symposium

On Monday I returned from a four-day job at the h&h, the international craft and fabric fair in Cologne. Handi Quilter had asked me to join their staff on the stand for some linguistic input and I gladly accepted because I had always wanted to go to that fair just out of sheer curiosity. It was a very interesting experience, if hard work. Long days, standing on hard floor, demonstrating and explaining - I found it much harder work than standing at the stand with my own fabrics, selling, rearranging the display. I was even more tired after the days in Cologne than I ever was at the consumer fairs I have been to. The ideal package for such a job should include a one hour massage every evening!

Before the opening of the show: two of my own quilts, and one from the
70,273 Project, which I quilted, decorate the stand

Mounting a fabric for demonstration purposes

Negotiations with Chuck Fresina from Handi Quilter

I had a bit of time to look around, too, and was amazed at the importance of knitting yarns at the show. 

From what I saw, you would think everybody in the world is knitting, and a lot. With some of the design pieces I saw 

Detail of the vest above - this is crochet, I assume worked in two steps,
first a black grid, and then an overlaying second pattern.

The edges of the circles are worked with individual threads,
no threads are carried over on the inner side.

Patchwork knitting...

I did wonder who would knit that kind of a project, and even more importantly, who would go around wearing something like that.

But I was very pleased to see so many interesting and high quality yarns around. 

This company became one of my favorites - perhaps because
their stand was just opposite from ours?

Another one I really liked (and got some of their skeins at the end of the show) was  https://cowgirlblues.co.za/. Check them out, their range is marvellous! You just hope that the trend towards knitting does continue, and that these smaller companies can keep it up.

When I returned home I had a rather unpleasant surprise, however. Over the four days at the show I had not really checked my mails on the computer, only on the phone, because in the evenings I was simply too tired to open the mail program. Because of some refugee-mailing-list that I have recently joined, the incoming messages have multiplied and it has become much harder to stay on top of the stream of messages, especially on the phone. So I had missed one message which seemed rather important. The evening before I left for Cologne I had finally sent off my application for the symposium that I had briefly mentioned a while ago. On the evening before the deadline, so almost last minute. Imagine my dismay when I found a message from the organizer could I please resend my attachment because he could not open the file. Monday evening is three full days after the deadline has passed… I did resend my attachment right then and apologized for not doing so earlier, but in my heart I started building a wall against disappointment at probably not being chosen because of late entry.

Waking up on Tuesday morning, however - I slept late, until 7.30! - there was a reply already, “all is good, my wife could open it after all, you’ve been selected, we will be in touch!” What a relief, although it did take a few hours to sink in completely.

By now I have started planning and preparing and am looking forward to the event. Even though it is going to be rather risky thing. We will be working in public, under a tent, yes, but if it is pouring rain, as it can be at that time of year, we are going to be cold and miserable, and how is my machine going to like that…? I will make sure to find out whether there will be a bad-weather-option available that we could relocate to.

Found Art and Reflections in March

Progress report: A Scrap a Day

Has it ever happened to you that you went to the theatre and suddenly about half way through the performance you realized that the stuff being acted out on stage was your own life in a way...? That happened to me Saturday evening, and by Sunday evening I hadn't quite recovered from that yet. But I am hoping that things will turn out better overall than they did on stage that night, because the result of the complications sure wasn't the way I would like my life to go on!
Another perturbing thing is that I have been looking for a set of notecards on which I had started with the preparations for a next quilt, in fact, the one that I would like to be working on should I really get accepted into the symposium. They have completely disappeared from the surface of the earth, I have looked in all possible places where they could have gone or been deposited. I am dead sure I would not have thrown them out. True, I can easily enlist the helpers again, who wrote those cards, they are certainly replaceable, but it would have been convenient and reassuring to find them and get deeper into the planning process. The quilt will be made, not matter whether I get into that symposium or not, but... In any case, these disturbing facts take up more of my emotional strength than I am willing to invest right now. But it can't be helped.

So here is a bit of a report on my Daily Art Project, A Scrap a Day,  yellow scraps put onto linen cut-offs.
For a few days I thought I would soon be running out suitable yellow scraps. I do have lots of yellow scraps, certainly, but many of them are rather large, or leftover pieces of strips that had been cut rather straight, which means they don't make for a particularly interesting addendum to the overall arrangement. For a very brief moment I had thought about starting a call for help, like 'send me your yellow scraps', but I soon relinquished that idea, because then I would probably be attaching yellow scraps for the rest of my life, so I am not doing that!
But then a final push towards the completion of the other long-drawn project of participation in the Baby Jane Project for the German Patchwork Guild resulted in a few more yellow scraps, some others appeared in a rediscovered box and bag, one of the big pieces proved to be worn and even ripped in a few places, basically begging for these sections to be torn off and treated as small scraps in their own right.

How much interference with the existing scraps do I allow myself? At first, at the very beginning, I thought I would just take them as they are and attach them. But as I just said - I hadn't realized that quite a few of them were rather largeish, or so straight and strip-ish. Perhaps ripping them is acceptable. I don't want to cut them with scissors or the rotary cutter because I don't want to produce scraps that look too neatly. Or may I - when I have a little spot on the linen that I would like to fill but don't have the fitting scrap to go in there...? We'll see how this develops.

A look into the scrap box, with the thread box, and quite a few things beneath...

One of the larger scraps that was left unaltered because it
had such a nice and unpredictable shape.
And two smaller ones that fit nicely into empty corners.

I am on the third piece of linen, and have counted the ones of similar color that I have. Not enough pieces to take one every month, but as you see, there are these noticeable empty spaces.

Again, I haven't decided what I will do with those. I could fill them with a snow-dyed yellow linen - scraps from a dress I had made last year - and attach blue (or purple - complementary color!) scraps to those. It is an interesting project. Keeping me more entertained than I had imagined. And it will be huge!

Going out of town tomorrow for a few days, will I just pull a few scraps out of the box without thinking ahead? Haven't started packing yet, so I don't know.

My day?

So yesterday was International Women's Day. Lots of articles, some demonstrations, strikes in Spain, a 'women's issue' for the weekly Friday magazine that comes with our daily newspaper, phone messages by female friends proclaiming our mutual appreciation and support.
It's half the world's population - one day for them.
And what is the meaning of it these days? I fear it is developing into an annual announcement that women's rights are still not equal all over the world, too bad, let's get on with our daily BUSINESS, and a few sale specials, because, don't all women in the western countries like shopping, and then be done with it, until next year?
I was pretty frustrated by it all by the end of the day.... where will it take us? Currently I am reading 'Sapiens - a brief history of humankind' by Yuval Noah Harari, definitely one of the best books I have read in a while, and as I am approaching the final pages I am still amazed at the clearsightedness with which the author describes processes that brought our species to where we are now. Somehow the banging about over International Women's Day this year hit the same notch. Are we really on the path to improvement, or have we lost it by now? I wonder...
At least after more than five months Germany is approaching a status where we will have a legible government again. Merkel, once more, but badly damaged, in coalition with a Social Democratic Party that is severeyl destabilizing itself, and the Christian Social Union that has been displaying non-Christian sentiments to a degree that is frigthening, especially over the questions of refugees and how Germany should deal with them. On the same day, however, Italy is voting much more on the right than anybody would want to, the US are declaring trade wars all around and ... helper convoys are not getting through to people in Eastern Ghouta .... all very worrisome.

How much solace can one get from a growing stack of quilts for the 70.273 project in circumstances like these?

Will be shown in an exhibition at the German Patchwork
Guild's AGM in Celle, early June

And from finishing a scarf that had been in the making a while ago, because I had loved the pattern but then got fed up with the fidgyness when the direction of the zigzag turned, so the whole thing was aborted, with a little edge of crochet around it, all it was missing was that button to be able to close the thing around a neck.

I finally put that button on:

And got to wear it at least once before winter is over -

Two small victories

It is bitterly cold, has been for a week or so, today it is below -10 degrees celsius even during the day. Usually that kind of temperature (which we don't have often) goes along with easterly winds, and they come up the valley, making the top ripples on the rive go 'upstream'. It never is a river with a noticeable flow (unless it is flooded, which happens infrequently as well), and the spot where the downtown bridge crosses over it is rather flat, so the direction of the flow is not necessarily noticeable from looking at the surroundings.

Looking upstream - and the 'waves' seemed to be headed that direction as well.

It has been so cold that I have seriously curtailed my walks or activities outside, and I am not a chicken in terms of temperatures, but the winds are just making it entirely unbearable, despite the fact that the sunshine is brilliant and luring.
So my brief walk a couple of days ago yielded a few pictures of marks, shapes, textures.

And a brief contemplation about why I haven't chosen this tree as a tree for observation and frequent photography...

Then I remembered - it's not been considered 'old enough'. And it is an oak, and I have done an oak.
Stitching is slow these days. A bit of quilting for the 70-273 Project, sending quilts out to be bound, too, and a few thoughts about things I could be doing. Thoughts only, as there has been only little time of leisurely contemplation because of the issues for the Senegalese friends. They have by now been allowed to move back into their former accomodation, and we hope that the neighbors will be more understanding, less hostile, but as of this moment we don't know. It's so cold they have kept their windows entirely shut. However, from the situations I witnessed when I happened to be present and the neighbor was beginning to have a go at them I must say that his reactions were completely overdrawn. So we will have to see when the weather gets warmer. Another issue was that one of them had received a warrant in summer for being in the country illegally and supposedly not having done enough to obtain a passport. In the summer he was acquitted, but the prosecutor was not satisfied and took the case to the next level, claiming it would have been possible for him to take more intensive action. So we have been busy writing letters, e-mails, trying to get statements about the ease with which somebody who never has had a birth certificate that he knows of could obtain such a birth certificate from outside the country of birth. Believe me, you don't want me to go into detail about all of this, neither do I want to do so here. But it has been keeping me busy, occupying my mind, and tying up my energy. Add to that the fact that this particular person is a very closed and difficult person, not easy to deal with, and I have to admit I don't particularly like him. But he lives with these other friends of mine, he turned to me for help, and I just felt like I could not let him fight this alone, especially because I think the way he was being treated was cruel, unjust and in my opinion even unconstitutional and against the law. Basically the prosecutor was demanding that he get engaged in corruption to obtain a birth certificate - definitely not something a prosecutor should be doing in a state that prides itself on its constitutionality and righteousness. In any case, today was the third (!) hearing in this case, which had also been postponed once, and he was acquitted again.
So I am very happy about this. Another minor victory, because it is only one case in court, and that does not mean that the authorities will take note of this case for other procedures. But we can refer to this. And he does not have to pay for the lawyer. That is a major aspect of it all. So two small victories within the last ten or fourteen days, that is something. The battle is not won yet, and a lot of fighting remains to be done. But I can be a little proud about myself. And I am.

I hope my mind will loosen up a bit now. I need to be doing more stitching. I did finish the challenge for the 12 by the Dozen that was supposed to be published on the blog today. Except for the binding.

text messages 16 (40 x 40 cm)

And I hope that the ideas swimming around in my head will materialize, turn out to be feasible.

"Modular Jacket"

Just about over a year ago I started knitting a 'modular jacket' from an interesting book with knitting instructions.

It had looked really good on the page, and I enjoyed knitting the squares, too. But somehow along the way something about it changed. It wanted to be something different.

So I watched and listened to what it wanted to be. And gradually it turned into a scarf.
With a bit of different colour arrangements, and other colours added, too.

And then I added a red I-cord on the outer edge.

Unfortunately, I had started the I-cord while I was in England, not having the book with me in which it was described how to do it - and not even thinking about the possibility of looking it up on youtube to see the exact way how to do it. I remembered some steps and thought I could get it done. I did get it done, but I am not too satisfied with the way it looks. I am most certain nobody will ever notice what I don't like about the looks, and I am telling myself that I, too, will get used to it.

It's a minor thing, can only be noticed when you look really closely. But it bugged me so much that I then finally came up with the idea of looking it up, because I wanted to know what I had done wrong. So now I know, after finishing the whole round, and for the next one I will not make the same mistake again. I hope this is a scarf that will stay with me, because only a couple of weeks ago I gave away another one, the one I made for the knit-along a while ago. Somehow all my scarves tend to want to go with other people...
And, affter all, the jacket pattern is still talking to me, there might be a second attempt... perhaps that will then really become a jacket.