Europe - winter 2024-25
Tomorrow we are headed to Belgium. I am excited to see my dear friend Marie-Ange again. She and I went to Burkina Faso, Africa when I was 17 and she was 18. Our friendship is almost 30 years old. It has been a pleasure to see her and her family again and more often after a hiatus of almost 20 years.
The next day we leave Brussels and go to visit my other dear friend Lieve. I met her in 2003 when Brian and I lived in Toulouse, France for three years. We see Lieve and her family about every four years or so and if we move back to France someday Lieve and Marie-Ange are humans I would like to visit more often.
The last four weeks have been a lot of fun. Mostly at my parent’s house in Branle Casaque. A week after the winter solstice we celebrated with my brother, Boris and my sister, Laura and their kids. My parents had a full house with us and their seven grandkids. Have I mentioned before that Zora is the only girl? And she lives all the way in the US. You can tell my parents are happy to have had all of us together again.
It has been 10 years since I visited my parents in the winter. Last time my grandma turned 90 and my three cousins and my two siblings and I made 90 pompoms for her and hung them in the room that we all celebrated her in.
This year, on January 29th, Mamie - Jacqueline Demotié is turning 100. I am so excited to celebrate this sweet woman! And to see my aunt, cousins,…
At my parents I have also enjoyed making large bags with tapestries of Einstein, Amy Winehouse, the Mona Lisa - a punk version of her, a lion,… I have purchased these tapestries at local fabric stores before but had only made two bags out of them. I have now made about eight bags. I have finally made up a pattern that I like. I started with the many smaller pouches I made for a lot of my family members for the holidays and used that same pattern in a larger version with straps, still a zipper and those fun tapestries to make larger tote bags. I can’t wait to show them to y’all.
Otherwise when it is bed time and my mom and I still want to work we leave the upstairs sewing room where Zora has been sleeping - in my bed up on the loft. We go downstairs and make baskets out of raffia, yarn, cords and sticks.
I wish you a new year full of traveling and adventures if that is something you like also.