Category Archives: Personal

Earthquake!

Today at 1:43 pm an earthquake happened in the middle of one of my physics lessons. The students didn’t quite know what to make of the shaking and vibration they felt and asked me what had just happened. I said I thought it felt like an earthquake. I was able to look it up during the break between the 7th and 8th period. It turned out to be the biggest earthquake in the area for two and a half years: 4.4 on the Richter scale. The epicentre was about 15 km from my school.

Everyone talked about the earthquake for the rest of the day. One of my colleagues said it was the first earthquake he’d ever experienced, which quite surprised me because I have only been living here for the past 14 years and have felt at least three quakes I’ve posted about plus one I mentioned and another I clearly remember because someone told me they had dreamed the books in their shelf had danced – only to learn that it had not been a dream.

Two stories about missed earthquakes: I spent five weeks at a highschool in Hesperia, CA in 1992 and had wondered about earthquakes before going. Of course, there was an earthquake in Hesperia during those five weeks – it happened in the few days we spent in San Francisco, so we didn’t feel it. And on the day after we returned to Hesperia, there was one in San Francisco.

Earthquakes are rare occurences in Northern Germany, so I never experienced one while growing up. One of the very few quakes there occured on October 20, 2004 only about 10 km from my parents’ house. Of course, they happened to be visiting us on that day, so they missed it as well…

This one goes to eleven, too!

This one goes to eleven, too!

All day Tuesday the thought went through my mind that January 25th was a special date somehow, but couldn’t for the life of me think whose birthday it was. I just remembered – this weblog’s birthday! So now it’s officially eleven years and three days old.

The first two sentences on my first posting:

I’d like to introduce myself first.
My name is Andrea Frick and I’m 24 years old.

Was I really that young? And don’t even look at the photo of André and me that was taken the previous year. (Yeah, back then we didn’t have a digital camera.)

Anyway, instead of a careless teenager student I’m now a responsible adult ;-) and will be off to work in a minute. Let’s see what the next eleven years will bring…

To the readers who have stuck with me for the past 1.1 decades, thanks!

Winter Wonderland

It’s been snowing quite a bit here during the last week or two, and by now we have about half a metre (19 inches) of snow, I think. I took some photos on Saturday morning, when there was much less snow than now.

Winter landscape around my village on December 18, 2010

This was taken during a walk around our village on Saturday morning, before it started snowing non-stop for the rest of the weekend.

I think this is the most snow we’ve had where I live since the winter of 1979, when the snow was higher than I was tall. Of course, I was a bit younger then…

The quilt is done!

My Plain Spoken napping quilt is finally done!

More than a year ago I ordered a Robert Kaufman Kona Cotton Color Card from Pink Chalk Fabric and chose 41 potential colors, of which I ordered a quarter yard each. When the fabrics arrived in January, I played around with them for quite a while until I settled on 24 colors that would go into the quilt: four reds, ten blues and ten greens.

I loosely followed the instructions for the Plain Spoken quilt in The Modern Quilt Workshop by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr of Funquilts.

Some technicalities for the fellow quilters among my readers (and for myself as documentation):

The colors are in no particular order

  • mahogany
  • burgundy
  • brick
  • wine
  • blue
  • baby blue
  • ice frappe
  • seafoam
  • aqua
  • sage
  • evening
  • regatta
  • slate
  • navy
  • zucchini
  • celery
  • artichoke
  • olive
  • spring
  • old green
  • laurel
  • celadon
  • asparagus
  • palm

I didn’t sew random pairs of wide and small strips as was advised in the instructions, but placed each rectangle before sewing them together in rows. Then I sewed the rows together to finish the quilt top.

The quilt was machine-pieced and machine-quilted, and the binding was attached to the front by machine as well. I used the Pfaff 230 treadle sewing machine from 1955 I got from my grandma for everything except sewing the binding to the back of the quilt, which was done by hand.

I pressed the seams open, basted with safety pins and quilted using a standard presser foot. I wore rubber gloves during quilting in order to have a better grip on the fabric; I had to move the quilt manually because the feed dogs are not strong enough to pull the weight of a big quilt.

For the batting I used Hobbs Heirloom premium cotton blend (80% unbleached cotton & 20% polyester).

The binding strip was cut 8cm wide and the pieces sewn together diagonally to reduce bulk at the seams. The exception was the part for the red corner, which was sewn together straight because I preferred the finished look. Then the binding strip was pressed in half lengthwise and attached to the front of the quilt by machine. I sewed it to the back by hand using “invisible” stitches, which took ten hours for the whole 7m.

The finished quilt measures 150 x 200 cm (59 x 79 in).

Finally, some photos. Click to see a larger version.


The front and the back side of the quilt. I used some leftover blocks from the front. The main backing fabric is Kona Cotton Sage.


The finished quilt on the couch in our living room. I picked the colors from the couch, the pillows and the table runner.


Another shot of the back.


You can see the quilting in this picture. If you look very closely, you can see that the stitch length is not very consistent, unfortunately, because of the difficulties mentioned above.


The red corner. When I chose the color for the binding, I didn’t realize that it would match one corner of the front. I didn’t like the idea of a monochromatic corner, so I pieced a bit of red in there. I think it adds a nice touch. You can see it better in this shot taken during sewing.