Incoherent Scribblings

I spent quite some time yesterday and today working on “Cat in Garden,” and am 13 hours into my new 15 hour rotation system. I made really good progress and estimate I am about 70% done.

I have uploaded some progress pictures in my Stitch Gallery, if you want to check them out! You may notice that currently there is no cat in the picture, but I hope to add him this weekend.

I must say I have had quite a love-hate relationship with this piece. It is the first large piece that I started on Evenweave. Since I started it back in March, I have completely converted from Aida to Evenweave, but at the time I was still learning how to count over two and it gave me quite the headaches at first! I had to rip out a lot because of counting mistakes.

In addition to that, this “garden” has many subtle shades of green. Since they are so close to one another, I have gotten confused a number of times as to which square with which color I am on.

It was the combination of these two things that made me put it down when I was only about 30% done with it. However, I really liked the design when I downloaded it free from the DMC site and hoped to one day finish it. In fact, when I started my “No More UFOs” rotation system I made a silent goal to finish it by the end of the year and it looks like I just might reach it!

11/20 Update: The cat has now entered the garden!

One of the things I like best about living in Germany are the endless hours of sunlight in the summertime. I remember the first summer we were here I was lying in bed on the longest day of the year at about 11:30 pm and looking out of the sky light when it occurred to me that it was still basically twilight. It was a clear night and I could only see a few stars poking out because the sky wasn’t black at all; it was a lovely shade of dark blue. When I remarked on how I really liked those long daylight hours, A. told me I would remember them fondly in December.

It didn’t even take until December for me to mark his words and wistfully wish for those seemingly never-ending June days. By November I had observed one of the things that I like least about living in Germany; the endless hours of darkness in the wintertime. That first year I was taking German lessons in the afternoon and my classroom faced west. Each day I watched the sun set a little earlier and by the time class was over at 5:00 the sky was already completely black.

Though I spent the last five years in the States in the south, it wasn’t like I was completely unused to cold and dark December days. Each year my mom would complain about how she had to go to work and come home in the dark on cold Iowa days. Basketball season was synonymous with darkness and I am convinced that most of the town turned out for basketball games as much for the brightly lit gymnasium as the team. However, since Iowa is part of the “Upper Midwest” and it receives plenty of cold and snow during any given winter I never really thought too much about its relative position in the world until I came to Germany.

When I mentioned to A. that though I was used to early darkness in Iowa, I thought maybe living in Texas and Mississippi had spoiled me: What else could explain the difficulty I had that first year with those short December days?

That was when we got out the atlas. He told me to locate the part of Iowa where I was from and tell him the latitude. I stated that it was 41 degrees north. Then he told me to locate Munich and do the same; 48 degrees north. As if the mathematical difference didn’t say something, we then looked at 41 degrees north in Europe and 48 degrees north in the United States: Southern Iowa was on the same latitude as Naples, Italy, while Munich lay on the same latitude as extreme northern Minnesota! It was then that I realized that even though I thought I was from the “north,” I was really, latitudly speaking, a southerner.

Today, I finally bit the bullet and went and got my hair cut. I went to “SuperCuts,” where they charged me 21 euros for a wash, cut, and blow-dry (which I had to do myself). I wash my hair everyday and told them I didn’t need a wash, but since the price was 21 euros with or without it, I gave in and let them wash it.

The girl did a good job at being gentle with my tender head and I must confess that, when done right, it feels so good to let someone else wash your hair! (Seriously, if it was my husband that had been doing the washing I would have considered it an erotic experience! Since it wasn’t though, it just felt really good!) My hair has now been washed twice today. Since they didn’t condition it at SuperCuts, not only is it super clean, it is also super fly-away!

At first I was just going to go with my regular straight-across cut, but the hairdresser and I started talking about layers and before you could say “bad dye job” I gave her the go-ahead to cut my hair into layers… LONG layers as I had a traumatizing experience in the late 80s with short layers. The longest layer is only about 2 cm (about 1″) and the shortest 5-6 cm (about 2.5″) shorter than what my hair started out as.

So, after the hairdresser was finished washing and cutting it, she showed me to this wooden bench where there were all sorts of styling tools laid out and instructed me that I could use any of these to finish “my new look.” Normally, I only blow-dry my hair when it is cold and I NEVER EVER use other people’s combs or brushes, but luckily I had a brush in my purse. Since it wasn’t too cold I thought about just paying and leaving, but as it was, there another girl drying her hair at the “styling bench.” Hers was a little longer than mine and red, and though it was pretty, I was of the opinion (modest and humble girl that I am) that mine was prettier. She was standing there drying her hair and making a great show of flipping it around and brushing it. Yep, you guessed it, I couldn’t help it… I had to join in and flip my hair around while brushing and drying it too. I don’t know what the other people were thinking, but I had a grand time! Finally, it was dry and I got a chance to give my new cut a good look. It came out pretty well and I think it looks fuller now.

Now, let’s see if my husband notices when he comes home from work…

Oh my god! I think I’m hooked on Blog Explosion! I signed up for an account there a while back, but didn’t really start using it until the last couple of days. I don’t want to even admit how much time I spent there yesterday and today (cough *hours*) surfing other people’s blogs!

The Stitching Blogger’s Question of the Week is:

Do you find that having another distraction (music, movies, people to talk to) while stitching helps you make progress or make mistakes?

With most activities, I can’t have anything else distracting me or I lose my concentration. I must have complete silence when reading, writing, or talking on the telephone for example.

However, with stitching, since I use CDs, TV shows, or movies to help me track my stitch time, these distractions help me to make pretty good progress. The only time I find that these distractions hinder my progress is when I try to watch a movie that I haven’t seen and stitch at the same time… then I make plenty of mistakes!

Besides that, I usually stitch while I am alone and so other people don’t tend to sidetrack me. Nevertheless, when I do stitch in the presence of others, it is not they who distract me, rather it is I who distract them as I have been known to suddenly start counting out loud in the middle of a conversation!!