Old Tools

This is a wooden darning mushroom my mother used when I was a kid. Must be at least 50 years old. My sister found it and presented me with it. I love these old tools, how beautiful they are, manufactured with great care (I love the floral engravings) and wearing all the marks of long hours of work (so many little holes from the picking darning needle). Noone does it anymore today, mending socks or clothes... I don't do it either. But I love to be reminded.

Sunshine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR6EAKH6bvw&feature=related

I learned that  because of copyright problems it's not possible all over the world to watch the video I recommended earlier. But this video here is nearly the same one and should work wherever you are. Enjoy! (and maybe cry, I did)  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7PAMgNEtSY&feature=related

Here is what this video is all about:

Chimpanzees are out in the sunshine for the first time in 30 years. They were lab animals, used for medical testing, and they had spent the last 30 years locked in cases. Some of them were born in the labs, some were taken and used for medical testing when they were kids and only remember vaguely now what it was like to feel the sun, to breathe fresh air, to walk on green grass.

Gut Aiderbichl (what a lovely person who made that all possible: Michael Aufhauser) became a refuge for them. Aufhauser built many places of refuge in Germany, Switzerland, Austria for animals who were mistreated, abused, abandoned.

This has nothing to do with quilts (or in some ways it has?), but I felt like mentioning it here.

So True

I love these two quotes.

"It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are."

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (Swiss-American psychiatrist and author)

http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/facade/

and:

"This above all, -- to thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Poetry

How lovely! The Nobel Prize to a POET! I do like his work!!

Tomas Tranströmer, Nobel Prize in Literature 2011 

Romanesque Arches 

            Inside the huge Romanesque church the tourists  jostled in the half darkness.

Vault gaped behind vault, no complete view.

A few candle flames flickered.

An angel with no face embraced me

and whispered through my whole body:

“Don’t be ashamed of being human, be proud!

Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.

You will never be complete, that’s how it’s meant to be.”

Blind with tears

I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza

together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Mr. Tanaka, and Signora Sabatini,

and inside each of them vault opened behind vault endlessly.

http://www.cprw.com/Coyle/transtromer.htm

           

"One More Thing"

Steve Jobs. 
He said in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address:

"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Quasicrystals

http://www.n-tv.de/wissen/Was-sind-Quasikristalle-article4461571.html

Isn't it incredibly beautiful how it all fits here?

Dan Shechtman received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of quasicrystals. 

I watched him on TV talking to journalists and this is the advice he had for scientists: 
"Be open."

Me

Someone asked me to post more pictures of myself here... so, well, here is one...just a snapshot...  ;-)

Autumn Quilt

I finished this quilt today. I used a simple, oldfashioned, more or less haphazard way to assemble the pieces for the top. (patchwork and quilting: all handmade) 
I used all kinds of fabrics, many scraps tell me stories about friends, family, travels... some of the fabric pieces are very old, they were parts of a tablecloth used by my grandparents. Some buttons, which I attached to hold all layers firmly together - in addition to some rough quilting stitches - , originally belonged to old bedlinen which was used in my family when I was a kid. The quilt is stuffed with warm materials, so it's fine for the cooler days and nights to come!