Sindelfingen

Phew!

What a busy week I've had.  I went to to Stuttgart last Thursday - or, to be more precise, Sindelfingen, just outside Stuttgart, along with 6 students from school, aged between 14 and 17.

The aim was to take part in an international drama workshop with students from Germany, France and Poland - and hopefully I can post some photos of what we got up to.......

Now, I've been to Sindelfingen several times, and had always thought of it as a typically bland industrialised medium sized town - nothing of particular note.

But on the very first day we were treated to a tour of the Altstadt (the old town), and, hiddden away, were the glorious old buildings:

During the Middle Ages Sindelfingen was a weaving town, and therefore pretty wealthy.  These houses date back to about 1400 or so.

Although the world's biggest Mercedes-Benz complex is in the city, where aircraft were built during World War 2, somehow the centre of the town escaped the heavy bombing by the RAF unscathed, including parts of the original city wall.

St Martin's Church - originally part of a monastery, whose wealth subsided the creation of Tübingen university, about 35 kilometres away. It's an unusual church as although it's built in the Gothic style, it has a separate tower, in the Italian style - so has ended up as a German/Italian hybrid, in the Black Forest....

If you look closely, you can see how the end of the church joins the building next to it - originally one of the monastery buildings.

The strange cross shape in the centre of the inscription is the mediaeval way of writing '4' - it's half of '8' (the top half).... 

Getting smaller

This week has been VERY busy workwise - sports day / Alton Towers / German exchange / Y11 prom, so I've focussed on getting some smaller things done.

Like this quilt top:

Now, other people have said that this is fine, but the top left hand corner isn't right, so I need to unpick it and restitch it (if even Mr Z&Z comments that its not good enough - I know it must be quite a glaring error!).

The top is about 8" square - I couldn't find anything sensible to photograph to give a sense of scale - at least, without moving off the chair - so in the interests of idleness, I put a pencil on it to give an idea of scale.

Of course, it still needs to be quilted - I'm hopeful that being so small, it will at least stand a chance of getting completed, as I won't be able to use my usual excuse of not being able to find a space large enough to lay it out flat......

The garden has been very productive - plenty of cherries:

a lot of which have just been bottled up in brandy (I'd hoped this was just a case of pouring it in neat, but no such luckl.  Lots of boiling up sugar syrup and poaching fruit, before putting it away.  And the lovely red colour seems to bleach out of the fruit as well).

This is the first crop that we've had from the tree - usually the birds get there well before us - but this year there was more than enough to go round.  I do wonder if the hard winter has meant a heavier crop, in some sort of way?

Pentrich Patchworkers and Barbara Chainey

And to Pentrich last weekend, to hear Barbara Chainey talk.  The event hadn't been very well publicised, but when I arrived, I remembered why.
Pentrich is a lovely little village, and the village hall is small.  With the chairs set out, there was enough room for 7 chairs side by side, a narrow aisle, and then another 2.  So a maximum of 9 people across the whole room.  I didn't count the rows back, but I'm sure that you can work out just how weeny the room was.

Teas and cake were being served, at the princely sum of 50p for a beverage, and 50p for a cake. 

Yes,  any cake at all from this whole selection.

The slices were enormous (and I'm sure it would have been rude not to have bought some...).

The hall was decorated with quilts - some still works in progress - that the Pentrich patchwork group had been doing as a round robin.  They'd drawn up a basic plan of rectangles and squares, placed their chosen fabric into a bag and then swapped it about, having blind faith that a year later their fabric would be returned to them, but now in a series of blocks to be assembled.

The variety was amazing:

At 2.00, Barbara took the floor, and spoke effortlessly for just over an hour about herself and her quilts, showing examples not just of her own work, but quilts that are in her collections. 

At the end, we were invited to 'rummage' about in her quilts, and there was a stampede to get up close to some of these amazing items.

To be honest, I was so busy having a good look at everything that I forgot to take my camera out.....

This is a small section of a quilt dating back to about 1880, I think, and bought at the Houston quilt show a few years ago.  It's now falling apart as it's so fragile (so perhaps allowing it to be mauled about by curious ladies with sticky hands isn't the best thing for it - just a thought...).

I love the colours.  The blocks aren't particularly difficult, but the stitching is beautiful - and all handpieced and quilted, of course.

I recognised this one at once - it's by Linda Straw, about whom I blogged last week.
The photos here are ones that I took - for others, I suggest that you take a peek at her blog, where she seems to be gradually uploading a lot of delicious images that are full of inspiration.