Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Goldener Herbst


Unrelenting solar death rays--Day 6.  The cats won't even go Outside, the sun is too hot. I got some chicken for dinner at the Wochenmarkt in the Marienplatz this morning, and had to wring the sweat out of my shirt after trudging back up the hill.



Naturally the Biergarten is closed for the winter.  10 Celsius degrees warmer than when it was open in May, but why would anyone want to sit outside and be refreshed when it's actually freaking hot?! 


We had a nice weekend.  Saturday there was a local fall/harvest/church festival with nice roast duck, handcraft stalls, and discount beer.  Sunday we went on a drive through the country to peep at farms and leaves, and stopped at a small airport to watch two-seaters, gliders, and helicopters at a cafe right next to the Flugplatz.


Monday I gave Smokey a bath, which was as usual traumatic for both of us, but he smells better now.  He got his revenge yesterday by pooping on himself and getting it on the couch, which is made from some weird automotive-upholstery garbage that can only be cleaned with plain water--and apparently not paper towels, because now it's all covered in little white bits I can't scrape off.  I secretly admire Smokey.  I also hate that couch.



Then I hiked 3km (did I mention unrelenting solar death rays?) over to the Sichtungsgarten, a final visit before it closes to the public for the winter.  Still a lot of color in the fall plants (and a lot of "green as neutral"), and bees, and spiders..... No beer though--the cafe is closed on Mondays, because why would anyone want to sit outside and be refreshed on a Monday!?



The pictures are all awful because I still don't know how to deal with the angle of the sun.  But they would be some interesting inspiration if I ever stop being a lazy piece of shit and start making things...


That's enough for today. Need to go think about doing something interesting to write about later.




Thursday, October 12, 2017

I am still alive, for some value of alive

Amazon Video blocked VPNs last month, cutting off my access to British Krimis and PBS costume dramas and 80s sitcoms.  I am left with German Netflix, which is 75% Scandinavian and Turkish content with German subtitles and the rest is Woody Allen movies (and "Friends", of which I would eagerly trade all ten seasons for a single series of Poldark) and YouTube. 

So I am listening to a lot of radio, like it's 1989.  Des Moines radio in the mornings, because the overnight robots don't talk, and German and British in the afternoons.  Radio is better for baking but two people can only eat so many muffins.

Also I have been hit with a cold--or possibly three different colds in rapid succession--going on three weeks now. Have run the whole gamut from sore throat to phlegm to more phlegm, but the constant symptom has been a nonstop choking death rattle.  I am mostly Not Letting Myself Be Stopped but if it's at all damp or chilly I can only walk about half a kilometer without struggling for oxygen.  Most of the foliage turned and passed while I was lying limply on the couch.

I have also gotten behind on the laundry, which makes me feel like a shitty human being.

Friday, September 29, 2017

Wiesn 2017--the Outtakes

Took my camera to the Wiesn ("the Oktoberfest" in American) yesterday, in the morning when it was still opening and uncrowded. 

The official blog will have the good clean family fun...but I have additional amusing observations.  No refunds if you are offended!


Let's get this party started.

Something is missing here... 
Probably the kids would find this hilarious, but I don't want a lecture from my mother.
I'm kind of wondering what year this sign was painted, because to me that looks more like the President than the Statue.
NASA astronaut holding a Bavarian flag?  Now *I'm* offended.

It's the Alien, hunched over a keyboard trolling angrily.

Boobs?  In Sci-Fi?  GET OUT! 


Speaking of boobs.  I dig the Cold-War imagery, though.


From a 1919 rotating swing ride.
Teufelsrad, with upskirt fiberglass!
"Dicke Berta", a strength game from the 1920s.  I bet she's fun, though.
A little more realistic.


So problematic!

Finally, don't get caught trying to steal Maßkrugs.


Friday, September 15, 2017

There it is! The Backside of Water!*

I am still thinking the backside of my hexagons are more compelling than the front side. Here is the front side of the snowflake design I was playing with about ten weeks ago. 



 Gut genug, and I will finish it, but the backside! That's where the action is!


And this has led to an experiment:


There's some potential here. 

I had a lot more to say, but I've got a weather migraine getting steadily worse.

*This song will change your life.

Thursday, September 7, 2017

Kindernachmittag at the Volksfest--Not safe for kids

It was Children's Day today at the Volksfest. I went about 90 minutes before all the games and rides opened up, to take some pictures in the daylight before it got too busy. 

You notice things in an empty fair in the daylight that you don't notice on a crowded Saturday night.

Here is the chocolate-covered-fruit stand.

Nope.  

Double nope.
I wonder if this works on normal people?  It just made me decide to go home.

But now I'm going to be looking for this kind of thing at every festival.  Ugh.

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Mini Hexagon Flowers

Officially I am going to blame my unproductive and grumpy August on the heat, although there were a handful of days where it was cool enough to cook food indoors.  September has been better.

Anyway, in July we went to Norway for two weeks. We had anticipated two weeks of rain and fog, so I packed some hand-stitching and of course hexagons are the perfect travel project. 

We got ten days of sun. I am not complaining.  I took over six thousand photos.

Plastic tray from the chicken vendor at the local market makes a great organizer for 1/2" hexies.



Finally there was a foggy day so I could sew on the ship.

I got about 12 of 23 flowers sewn while away.  Back at home, I finished up the top while binging things I'd downloaded from Norwegian Netflix. Protip: when downloading abroad verify that movies are *entirely* in a language you understand; I ended up with characters speaking in Polish with Norwegian subtitles for ten minutes at a time and I'm pretty sure I missed some major plot points.


With this piece I am "exploring green as a neutral" or maybe I'm just still angry that in 1998 I was told my (classic 1930s) clean white backgrounds in quilt blocks were "unsophisticated" and "boring" and now that the millennials think they invented quilting, clean white backgrounds are "stunning" and "breathtaking design".  I actually got the green fabric here in town last year; the copyright date on the selvedge is 2006 and I wouldn't be surprised to learn it had been on the shelf that long. I'm not really complaining because green was out of fashion for awhile and I *need* green. The yellow is leftover from a project I started in 1998 and haven't finished yet (with an unsophisticated white background, harrumph) and the pinks are from the late-90s through this year.

I may pad out the sides with more green hexagons so the piece is more square, if the shop downtown has any left. Right now I think I only have enough green for the binding.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Gah

I missed the deadline to enter my quilt in the show in Erding; it happened while I was on vacation.

MARCH 2018.

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Too hot to turn the iron on

It's summer, there's no A/C, and it really is that awful.  Suppers are cold cuts, cold salads, and ice cream.  Thursday it was too hot to drink beer.  Such needless suffering!  And I used to live just down the road from Willis Carrier's place!

I got a couple of snowflakes into a new hexagon thingie before it became too hot to turn the iron on.

Think Snow

Still 1/2" hexagons; it's a sample for a possible larger effort but I don't know if I have enough blue/white/silver fabrics and I haven't talked myself into justifying paying for shipping new ones. 

Anyway.  Once forward progress was stopped, I dug into the Box of Parts and found some projects waiting to have bottle caps applied with shisha stitch.  It's been...let's call it "more than two years"...since the last time I attemped to apply bottle caps with shisha stitch, and I couldn't figure out how to keep going after the foundation stitches, so I hit up Ye Olde Interwebs and found a very nice tutorial here at Needle 'n Thread, along with some other stitches and videos. 

After a day or so of practice, she released an e-Book all about shisha, including some different foundations for irregular objects.  It's like the Universe is telling me I should finish these projects that I started...I'm still not admitting to anything older than "more than two years ago".

Here is a practice sample from last week (left) next to a sample from before (right). I don't even know what that red stitch *is*.  I like that looks open and net-like, but I have no idea how to replicate it.  I don't even know if that was the stitch I was originally taught in 2004, or my own mutation.


What was interesting about the old way is instead of the bottle cap resting on top of the fabric, I seem to have embedded it so the top is flush with the surface.  Not a great side view, but there is a very noticeable difference when I put them next to each other.


Weird.  Everything is weird.  And sweaty.

Monday, June 19, 2017

Mini Hexagons 1.0: Finished!


The convention for showing a finished quilt on a contemporary quilt blog seems a nice gauzy photo on a rocking chair or grass or antique oak table with flowers or cupcakes, strategically styled so you can't see the bobbles and bubbles and fuckups.

I don't have any of those things.  And even if I did, it's too hot out in the sun today and I am hiding in my Arbeitzimmer in the dark.  Please enjoy the reverse side of a cutting mat and the un-pointy points.


I finished over the weekend (I am 3/4 through Season 3 of Babylon 5).  Actually finished, quilting and all.  I decided to machine quilt the yellow centers, and the yellow border.



But only on the inside of the border.  I spent about a day working out the details for the binding on this sample; originally I stitched close to the edge of the outside hexagons, and it was too difficult to trim the binding because the stitches were too close to where my scissors needed to be.  Now I know why people do samples. (This green bit was an earlier idea that I had intended to be sleeker and not so puffy, so it goes into the Box of Parts.)

Border stitching.
 
Marks for trimming.
Binding hexagons.  Only made one mistake here.


The binding method has a thousand tutorials on the Internet.  I think I used this one from Quirky Granola Girl because it's the one I saved to Pinterest.






The starch step was interesting, because it's been literally 10 years since I've stitched anything that required starch (I prefer the imprecise), and on top of that I had no idea how starch is packaged and sold here.  The aerosol can seems very similar to US spray starch (plus it has a cat on it) but with more scent because all the German laundry products are drenched in scent.  There's also a liquid starch that goes in the washing machine with your clothes (the bottle had directions for T-shirts, seriously) that I think is similar to US liquid starch, but I haven't bought any to experiment with yet.




When I went to the Patchworkmesse in Erding in March, I was grumpy because I hadn't submitted anything because I never finish anything bigger than an index card.  Now I have something to submit.  Free admission, baby!!  Woo-hoo!

Thursday, June 15, 2017

Fronleichnam

Today is a holiday, Corpus Christi. Last year I went to the Mass in the Marienplatz, just to check it out (I had to bail on the procession to the Dom after 45 minutes bc there was just too much sun). This year I've stayed home in the dark, with the recurring headache.

Had peanut butter toast for breakfast. I've been avoiding comparing the peanut butter I can buy here at the Edeka with peanut butter I haul back from America, but this morning there was one toast's worth of "Barney's Best" left in the jar and I was hungry for a second toast, so I got out my hoarded and rationed jar of Skippy, and turns out they taste pretty much the same. Stared for awhile at the labels, and they list the same ingredients in the same order. Barney's lists an importer, not a manufacturer, and Skippy lists a distributor, not a manufacturer.  I'm now very curious about American peanut butter factories.

Might also explain why I like the taste of the Barney's better than the more expensive brand called "American", which is also imported but with a different fat listed in the ingredients. But both have great labels, with American flags, which I am saving for an eventual paper quilt.

Sunday, June 11, 2017

Bierfestival Moosburg

Yesterday we went to a beer festival a short train ride away, in Moosburg.  It was the first one held in the town, and there were a lot of people there so I hope it's not the last. Interesting mix of hipsters/beer geeks and Moosburgers made for some good people watching.

I like the German beer festival "pay per drink over an entire weekend" method better than the American "pay a lot of money for a ticket and drink all you can manage in four hours" method.  No one's puking on your shoes because they're determined to get their money's worth, you can bring a non-drinking friend for cheap (I skipped more than one Indiana festival that did not offer a reduced entrance fee for designated drivers), and they're more accessible to normal people, by which I mean people who aren't on Untappd. This last point seems like an advantage for breweries; you can't introduce casual drinkers to your product at a venue only hardcore geeks are willing to drop $50 attend.

We tasted 14 different beers, mostly by not ordering the same thing at the same booth.  The pours ranged from 0,1L to 0,3L and from 1-3€ depending on the style; most were more generous than advertised.  Notable were a Dampfbier (steam beer) and a cherry porter that tasted very American.  Even with the train tickets and food, we spent less than the price of two Indianapolis-area beer festival tickets for about the same amount of sampling.

I was well-hydrated before we left home, and feel a little dehydrated but otherwise fine today. Perhaps I did not eat enough pickles.

Friday, June 9, 2017

Here's a picture of my cat

I've had a headache for two days--probably related to the toothache I've had for awhile, but the dentist "didn't see anything"--and very little has gotten done.  But yesterday was not too hot and last night I was able to sit outside and listen to the Brewers.

FUZZ came out with me, but he watched birds in the neighbors' yard instead. He doesn't particularly care for baseball. 


Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Mini Hexagons--Now What?

Last week I very diligently finished Season 1 of Babylon 5 and also decided I had enough hexagon flowers.


I spent a day or so debating a border.  Monday at 5:30 a.m., after the cat who woke me up went back to sleep, I decided a border might make it easier to finish off (this is a design principle I may have learned in 4-H along with line, shape, balance, etc.).

Halfway through the second season, it looks like this:


I had not realized this yellow-gold was so...aggressive.

Anyway, now I'm stuck. I have no idea how to quilt this baby. I never get to a "quilting" stage of any project, I usually abandon pieced tops about 3/4 of the way through so I don't have to think about the quilting.


I have an idea for the binding, but that comes after the quilting.

Friday, May 26, 2017

Mini Hexagons

Something I'm working on, mostly as an excuse to watch television (streaming Babylon 5). 



Each hexagon is 1/2" on a side.  I'm gluing the fabric to the edges because I can't figure out how thread-basting doesn't ruin the papers.


These are all scraps and the dark navy is from 1997 (leftover from a UFO that didn't make a move, but I can't remember which move).




Yesterday I experimented with using ladder stitch instead of whipstitch but at this size there doesn't seem to be a noticeable difference.

I don't know how big it's supposed to be, or even what it *is* really.

This is where quilt and craft bloggers are supposed to name-drop someone from the industry in hopes of building AdSense traffic, or complain-brag about "hubby" or flaunt something from their lifestyle, but that's all boring so here's a picture of my cat FUZZ with his new favorite plastic bag.




Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Today

Dropped off my parents at the airport, decided I wanted to spend the day home alone, and drank some beers while I updated the official blog. I no longer care if anyone is bored by it (but I'm still keeping it light and clean and suitable for children because I hope that my niece and nephews will look at it sometime).

I've decided I'm tired of trying--and failing--to write entertainingly about "ex-pat life", whatever the fuck that is, and just dropped some of my wannabe-art photos. Could add some food posts in the future. Definitely need to add more cat posts. It's actually a lot more fun now that I realize no one will ever read it.

Monday, May 22, 2017

tomorrow

Today I have some ideas, but it's my parents' last day here so we're just hanging out with beer and cats. Tomorrow it's on.

The weather has been quite nice, can sit outside with hand stitching until the tablet battery runs out.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

I can't get started

I'm having a problem figuring out what to do first. And I have this problem every day...it's lunchtime and I haven't started anything.

More Pinterest will help, right?

Monday, May 15, 2017

And on the official blog...

Some of Mr Radish's family said they'd like to see more pictures on my official blog, so today I threw up some photos from a subset of the trip with my parents to Salzburg.

It took nearly four hours to sort through the photos, select a handful of good ones, run them through Photoshop (I have macros for re-sizing and watermarking, but all cropping, rotating, and color adjustments are done by hand), upload and label them with captions, and look up a few informational links to sprinkle into the narration. This does not include the two hours Windows Update hijacked my laptop (I spent this time cleaning things and making a pea salad for supper).

I'm not really sure it's worth it.

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Decompression

Friday, after a solid two weeks of constant companionship with bonus public transportation, I didn't leave the house. I watched two episodes of Paul Sorvino-era Law & Order, read a book and a half, wasted too much time on Twitter, prepped a bunch of paper-piece hexagons, and cobbled together supper out of things I found in the fridge (starring some pork steaks from the freezer in a "leftover wine" marinade). I did put on pants to take out the garbage, but only out of respect for the neighbors. I feel better now.

Yesterday we went to a Craft Bier Messe in Landshut(can't figure out how to link with the tablet), with the train, met the Yankee from Yankee & Kraut, and generally had a great time. Logged 20 new beers into Untappd, including a British beer brewed with rose petals. Still not a fan of Reinheitsgebot, but starting to appreciate Dopplelbock and Weizenbock and anything aged in rum barrels.

Today I'm sitting in the shade drinking water. Didn't eat enough pickles yesterday.

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

trapped in Introvert Hell

We had a party on Saturday, for R's dad's birthday but mostly to get the family together even though no one was dead. As it was a long weekend, people hung around until Monday evening. Then yesterday I took my parents, who are visiting for two weeks, into Munich. For the entire day.

I need to spend today speaking only with cats. I am completely fucking exhausted. Getting plenty of sleep and coffee, just need to be alone. No smiling politely, no one criticizing my dinner, no one interrupting my reading of something interesting or useful to prattle about hairdos. Also maybe some gin.

But instead I have to go pick up my parents and we will go to the Wochenmarkt, and I have to ask all the meat vendors if they have Blutwurst. My mother is obsessed with it. (I explain that my mother is visiting from America and likes it. People laugh.)

Aargh.

Saturday, April 29, 2017

test test

If this works I can rant without waiting hours for Windows to let me use my laptop.

Pictures will be difficult, though.