Greetings from Germany

Hello from Berlin, where the Other and I are staying with a very generous friend of his. So generous, in fact, that she gave us these lovely vintage Bavarian tea towels.

They’re 100 percent linen and she reckons they’re from the mid-1960s, though they were fresh out of the original package yesterday. The colours are splendid—very vibrant, since the towels haven’t been used—and pink and orange is a particular favourite of the Other. Could make for quite a nice appliqué design, eh?

Fabric shopping in Berlin has so far yielded little; the impressive craft section at KaDeWe had a decent amount of quilting fabric (though we'd been explicitly told by someone upstairs that there was no patchwork fabric to be had in the whole store), but most was imported from America and thus 1) nothing new, and 2) inflated in price, even without figuring in exchange rates. There was, however, a flurry of childlike excitement when we discovered some German quilting magazines (from earlier this year—still looking for more current issues). I’m looking at the pictures and marking pages for the Other to translate—it was only a matter of time before I inducted him into my quilting sweatshop somehow. Bwa ha ha!

In the continuing adventures of Manquilter Misunderstood by World at Large, we also stopped by Knopfloch (“buttonhole”), a pretty basic craft shop in Alexanderplatz. When told I was looking for quilting fabric, a woman working in the shop proceeded to gesture at the bits of fabric in some sample quilts to describe to me what patchwork was. It was a valiant attempt at education and at English, but there’s just something a little silly about someone straining their communicative faculties to express what someone else already knows. I guess in any language male + quilting = clueless. And to be fair, the level of my German puts my cluefulness rather in question.

More shops further afield, so stay tuned.