Tuesday 27th July - Nearly everything on the list...

 I'm back to playing my Roland digital harpsichord again - it's probably been gathering dust for nearly a year, but what with one thing and another I haven't been playing the piano or anything much. Until I drastically cut down on the teaching back in March last year, I was hardly doing any playing in the evenings and weekends, although I usually did a ' piano project' over the Summer holidays.

this isn't me!

This Summer's project is to try and play some Bach - starting with the Partita in B flat and the Goldberg Variations. I'm not aiming for any great mastery of the Variations - but if I manage get hack my way through each one I shall be very pleased. I'm making more of an effort with the Partita. 

The drawing book - 'Learn to Draw in 30 Days or Less' - continues to astonish me! The last two lessons were on single point perspective - not something I've ever bothered too much about before.

Yesterday's was on how to draw a room;

and today's was drawing a street;

I'm up to lesson 23. Tomorrow I tackle 2-point perspective....

I just follow the instructions, and out pops a picture - how does that work?

Also  a painting - I saw some leaves against an evening sky for just a couple of second on television the other evening, so I did the background one day, the leaves the next, and today added some lines using a pen that has brown sparkly ink.

 The sparkles don't show up much...

The two knitted pot-holders went through the washing machine at 40 degrees as instructed at the end of the knitting pattern, and came out completely felted. The larger one is using the pattern, but I suspect that somewhere along the way things went astray because it is meant to be flat. I made a simplified version for the smaller one. They do look amazing - I shall make some more!

Finally, I am gradually typing up poems written by my grandmother when she was young - they are from around 1910 - 1920. The idea is to collect them into a booklet so that anyone in the family who is interested can have them. (I knew there was some purpose to learning to type at the beginning of this year!). There is a whole box full of her poems, memories, talks to the Mothers Union, stories...

At the moment I am working through an envelope labelled 'Youthful Poems'. At first I found the writing quite tricky, but I am beginning to 'get my eye in'.

Nearly everything on the list, I said - no hoovering, cleaning, tidying, you notice...