Lady Fingers - a reflection on Lockdown Life

Feeling kind of reflective lately, it happens when I'm left to my own devices, and I think coronavirus is having that effect on many of us.

It's making us all contemplate the things we do and don't need in our lives, it's establishing the things that we may be willing to work on changing, about ourselves or our lifestyles.

And, whilst we are figuring these things out, bit by bit, it's giving us the opportunity to focus and make time for the things that we DO find most important.

For me, family and friends have always been an important part - during this time my parents and I are calling daily, to check in with each other.  My BFF and I are making great progress in maintaining our social contact with a weekly Skype craft evening.  My faith has become a mainstay, and the opportunity to attend Mass (even virtually) on a Sunday, helps to reset my inner turmoil a bit, and give me strength to face the day ahead.

Oh, but I DO miss church so much, and singing with a group of friends.  I've had many social gatherings online over the last few weeks, but it's all one-way - we are all missing the chance to sing TOGETHER.  We're planning to attempt an online catch up with some singers and parishioners, in the hopes that we can maybe lead some kind of get together.  Let's see how well the technology assists us in this.

On the plus side, we've been trying new items in our shopping, nothing major, but frozen variants of our usual favourites, so we can waste less and not worry about things going out of date so quickly.  We've been playing together more at home, with card games and backgammon, and (or course) a bit of tech-assisted stuff in a family console game.

Oh - and finally - why lady fingers, you ask?  Nothing to do with trifles - but having not played the guitar at church for around 7 weeks now, I HAVE FINGERNAILS! 

Life INSIDE the washing basket - more lockdown stitch-along

Sitting composing this post while watching the latest daily Coronavirus Update, so the situation has not changed any on the outside of the basket.  It's kind of like the government's own daily update on their Washing Basket of duties and cares.

I'm planning a bigger blog post at some point, cos I'm feeling quite reflective on it all at the moment.  But for now I will stick to the post title and talk more about the SAL.

Last night, we had another good old session on Skype, much nattering and giggling over my BFF's strange experiences with a toilet cistern. And lots and lots of stitching from us both.  So - from the incomplete pie chart last week, I can now start to see a flower forming in the middle - which is odd, as actually there will be several flowers in the middle.  It's getting very hard to resist breaking the rules on this and stitching more - our blogs are keeping us honest, as we share the pictures so we know where we were at when we finished for the night.

Don't forget to check out hers at http://apatchworkofcrafts.blogspot.com

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.