If you follow me on insta, you know that I almost all of my photos that aren’t of Andy drinking spearmint milkshake like a tiny hummingbird, or of me accosting whichever cat stumbles into my vicinity, are of plants. So here it is guys! The obligatory ‘spring is coming to my country, my heart, and my balcony’ post of 2016.
Did I ever mention that, instead of studying plants, I nearly did my PhD on coccolithophores? If I did, you maybe forgot, simply because the word coccolithophore is such a ridiculous mouthful. The name of the coccolithophore species I was going to study is Emiliania huxleyi, which isn’t really that much better. E-hux for short.
The weekend before Easter, Andy and I popped up to Amsterdam to visit Ikumi.. and on the day we flew out I stumbled across an amazing fabric market. I told Andy to ‘go on ahead’, spent about a hour touching and cooing and stroking, and many euros (although surprisingly few for the amount and quality of fabric), and an extra check-in bag later, we made it home to Berlin.
Last month was undoubtedly, the worst month of my Phd so far. Germany is good, don’t get me wrong, but experimental science can be the most heartbreaking of quests. The worst part is when the input doesn’t equal the output. When things don’t work, and you don’t know why. At these times, we scientists unanimously turn to our other lives. We swear to become bakers. Crochet tiny animals from twine. Start knitting, drawing, felting, sewing. And grand desserts parade from our kitchen. And the freezer is full of falafel. And the house never looked so clean. We want to do something, that does something. That produces a tangible product. Like a mobile!
I started sewing up this ‘dress’ a couple of months back, and finished it right before the Christmas break. Finished should also be in quotation marks, because there are still a few things I want to do with it before it’ll really be done, but we’ll get to that later. (I probably should have also ironed it before the ‘photo shoot’, but, you know, I don’t want to overreach with the domesticity).