Life INSIDE the washing basket - lockdown stitch-along

How is it possible that it's already a week since last week's blog??

We had planned to do our S-a-L tonight to allow time for Great British Sewing Bee, but the BBC plonked it in the 9pm slot, so we had time for a Wednesday catch up as normal.

Had a good old chin wag, and a lot more stitching.  Decided I was going round the outside to ensure that I'd measured the stitches correctly, and the updated item, you can see below.

My BFF had a more frustrating night with some frogging required, but I'll let her tell you about that over on her blog:
 http://apatchworkofcrafts.blogspot.com

Tune in next week (and maybe even before) for more stitch-related ramblings.

Life INSIDE the Washing Basket - Part 2

So - embracing the 'new normal', here's part 1 of our mini-project - can you tell what it is yet?  Ha!  I've seen pictures of the finished articles and I still can't really fully understand how it will stitch up to produce them.... we shall see.  It is a 'biscornu' - I'm not going to add pictures here of how it's supposed to look, until we reach our finished articles.  It is worked in two pieces, this is the start of part 1 of those.

Biscornu side 1, week 1 and 2

Our biscornu project comes with some rules:

• We are only permitted to work on the items together on craft nights, whether virtual or in person
  
• No additional work may be carried out outside these nights, we have plenty other UFOs (UnFinished Objects) that we can be working on, or pick up any other small projects.
  
• We will share our work in progress so we can celebrate our ongoing successes with it, and share those with the rest of the blogosphere.

As my BFF and I had plans for a previous quilting project that we were to work on simultaneously, and I was totally unable to commit to my side of the work, we decided to start smaller on this next one.  As a result I'm really enjoying the process of working on the same item together, and don't feel like I'm so far behind.

Head over to http://apatchworkofcrafts.blogspot.com/ to see my BFF's progress on the same item...

A New Normal? Life INSIDE the washing basket - PART 1

Well - life has certainly thrown a lot of change at me since last I blogged.  Some of that I will save for a different blog posting, as it's too BIG for a quick update thing.

I guess some of this stuff is BIG too, as in global-big.  You'd have to have been sleeping under a bush for over a month not to have heard about the global corona-virus pandemic.  With that pandemic comes a requirement for at least a temporary 'new normal', as the country is on lock-down, only allowing us out of our homes to shop for essentials, exercise once a day or travel to work (but only where we can't work from home).  Businesses and shops and pubs and restaurants and, well, most of everything normal, are shut.  I'm not going to describe it all here, I'm learning to deal with my own anxieties about it as I go along, and might expand on those in later postings when I can figure out my own head enough to write about it for others.

So the upshot is that work has moved to the computer room, shortening my daily commute from 3 hours 20 minutes to approximately 20 seconds.

But how to maintain that other, perhaps most important part of 'normal'?  By that I mean work and social interaction with humans outside our own home... and the answer is largely, of course, technology.  Work meetings take place on Slack or Skype, with occasional telekits where we need masses of people to hear the same message together.  Church has been substituted with viewing Mass over live stream on YouTube.  WW meetings have been (ironically) easier to get to, with many available online workshops after I've finished work for the day.  And craft night with my BFF, which we'd struggled to co-ordinate for a couple of months, what with school meetings and other outside social engagements, has been resurrected using Skype.  As we're in a different space in my friend's home, free from the television to distract us, we talk more, and we've definitely stitched more at the same time than we've done in quite some time.  In fact, that's led us to a mini-project that we plan to work on during our lock-down craft nights, and we will share progress on our blogs together - seems only fitting when the technology is part of the story.  More on that in the next blog post though....

And it's all over now

Well - workshop 2 for the first module was much better, and I went away with a renewed confidence.

However, fast forward a month or two and passing through the pain of the assignment - for which I managed a bare pass, I found myself at the first workshop for the second module, and the old doubts were surfacing.

The workshop wasn't as bad as the first module stuff, and the module materials were interesting.  But I found myself again struggling to relate the materials to the government setting of my day-job.  And I was beginning to feel like the time and energy spent on the Masters was actually preventing me from focusing on my real life work.

And, if I'm truly honest, I found the structure of the Masters just wasn't for me - I'm much more of a practical learner, and there was little opportunity for that, lots of opportunity to read how other people had discussed doing things.  And whilst I could become more confident in referencing etc, there just wasn't that DESIRE for it that I found with my OU studies.

So - with a glad heart (oddly), I decided to withdraw from the Masters and get to focus on the day job for a while before I think about what's next in the way of learning.

What's next for the blog?  Hmm another interesting journey which looks to take us to new and interesting places..... stay tuned....

Restoring the faith? Module Workshop 2

Hmm... so many thoughts in my head that haven't actually made it to virtual 'paper' as blog posts.  So I guess I should start at the beginning, and pick up from where I left off last time.

The second workshop rolled around, and I have to admit to feeling largely dread for this, after the experience of the first one.  It didn't help that, once again, the confirmation email came in inviting me to an entirely different location - from Leeds to Manchester.  And unfortunately, I couldn't do Manchester, as my dear friend Sarah passed away, and I was organising and leading music for her funeral service on the first day of the workshop.  So, after speaking to my Skills Coach, we reorganised my workshop for London.  Crikey... London... in December??

Feelings of deep relief, when arriving to see that the tutor leading this one was NOT the tutor from the first one.

So... how did it go?  Hmm... well... not perfect, but the tutor did seem to actually listen to us, and we did lots of work preparing ourselves for the assignment.  I actually finished the day feeling like I knew where to begin with the assignment, and how to structure it.

And being in London was actually nicer and less scary than I'd thought, even managed to take myself out for a walk and navigate the streets around the hotel.  The venue for the workshop was right next to Tower Bridge, and I made at least one great contact who can share in some of the pain and expectations of the experience.  I'd go back there again, for sure.

More thoughts yet to come on the assignment, but I will save those for the next post.

Workshop 1 - Day 2 - is it over yet?

Starting to feel that way even about the blog posts of the experience - does that tell you how simply awful it was?

Day 2 - I think we all came in at least prepared for the experience to be bad - but it made Day 1 look like a fun day at the park.

This was another of those days where we'd asked questions about what would be covered in the assignment, only to be told to stop worrying about it, we'll cover it this afternoon.

Much of this day was spent trying to create a Software Requirements Specification for our fake system.  However, I don't feel like we actually created much, we asked for examples as none of us had experience of this level of documentation, we were signposted in the task to some formal specifications, however a 130 page document is not really an appropriate format for an hour's worth of discussion with colleagues.  Once again we were accused of 'wanting the answers', and at this point something finally snapped, and the course descended into a yelling match.

Several of us were very vocal about the fact we just weren't being listened to, that he wasn't answering our questions, and in fact half the time he wasn't even listening to our questions.  We just wanted to get some idea of how his mental process worked when it would come to marking our assignment, what kind of things he found good and bad and why.

I can't really say the afternoon got any better, but we did finally get to look at the module assignment, which should be helpful in guiding our focus on the learning for the rest of the module.  And from this we were able to glean that making sure you cite lots of sources for your argument seems to be the most important thing the tutor is looking for on this module.

Finished the day with some scathing feedback on the train ride home, and then salvaged the day by going to the fireworks display with my family.

Phew....what a ride.... can't believe we get to do it all over again in less than 4 weeks for Workshop 2!!

Workshop 1 - Day 1- Just tell us about it, already!

Yeah, I know, this has been a pretty rambling post - but I don't know if I've ever had so many thoughts tumbling around trying to be heard, all from one single experience.

Nothing to see here

So, our module tutor finished off with the introductions, and we thought, "Great, now we get to learn some stuff"....ah... that's not what the tutor had in mind.... it's going to be a facilitated process where we will work in teams to complete some exercises which you should have looked at before now. 

In the midst of this, a latecomer arrived, having attended at the original address from the invite, to be greeted simply with a very rude "You're late", and no welcome from the tutor.  Did he think that someone really wanted to be turning up halfway through the morning at their first workshop?

OK moving back into the module then... we'd seen the exercises (some as late as the day before the workshop due to yet another admin error), but there was a lot of stuff in there that we didn't exactly know how to begin... like the first question, around completing a risk assessment for our fake system to be designed.  So we shared that fact with the module tutor - and the general theme for the experience began right there.

"You are all supposed to be here studying at Level 7, you should know this already" (errr.... how does someone straight from a maths degree get experience of writing risk assessments please?), and then there followed a 15 minute lecture on the difference between Level 4 learning and Level 7, (with slides) which I'm sure might have been more useful and helpful if it wasn't being used to berate us for not knowing something. "Anyway, I haven't got time to teach you about that". (you just wasted 15 minutes where you could have explained in telling us about different levels..)

On the plus side, working through the exercises with people employed in different workplaces enabled us to discuss the differences between our working practices.  There was also a lot of discussion around the difference between a simple analysis and a critical one, which I'm sure will be of assistance when it comes to completing the module assignment.

However, it would have been much more helpful if the tutor had been less, well, critical, and more eager to show us the difference between how to structure an argument for L7 versus L4/L6.  Anything helpful that he did show us, he would scroll up and down really fast, with no proper discussion.  By the end of Day 1, I had a headache and was totally regretting putting myself through this.

It was the same whenever we asked a question, "You don't want me to give you all the answers you are Level 7 students" - no we didn't want the "answers", just guidance on what he thought was a good answer, given that he will be the one to mark our assignments at the end of the day.

Building a team
I guess the positive outcome of Day 1 was the camaraderie that grew between us students, out of sheer frustration at the module tutor and his unwillingness to listen to questions.  We finished Day 1 at the pub, and had a good old rant about the experience with each other, and learned a bit more about each other along the way.

Yeesh that was one long day.... so much so that I will start yet another post....