Friday September 21st - Making a Wreath

Hi there! Christmas is a-coming!

I had a happy hour or so at our local fabric shop with a good friend, learning how to make a scandi-wreath.

Wossat?

It's one of these;

A load of strips of material tied along a string - well, three pieces of string knotted together. The main skill seemed to be in choose where to put the bells... 

Friend and I spent the rest of the morning looking in various shops for ideas on where to source the fabric strips to make more of them, but without buying quantities of pristine fabric and snipping it into bits. I was thinking that, with the addition of some tinsel or fairy lights, it would look nice and festive.

I've been neglecting this blog for a couple of weeks. There have been circumstances. Nothing bad, just all-consuming events.

Such as the start of term - hours of admin, chasing paperwork, being pursued for paperwork, being told Not to do this, or to hurry up and Get On with that. Two weeks of term have passed, and my timetable is more settled.

Apart from 'can I change my day to Friday?' 'No, I'm not teaching anyone on Fridays.' 'How about Monday then?' It will take about three phone calls to see if can be arranged.

And 'I need you to add in an extra pupil on Saturday.' (Note the different tone of voice - that's The Office, not one of my home students. Hopefully They will make all the phone calls. So long as I have ten minutes to nip to the Ladies or drink my coffee. Choices, choices.

Did I mention a Great Family Get-together all of last weekend? We only rolled up for Saturday afternoon and evening, and Sunday. The Mega-Family-Get-Togetherers started on the Thursday, staying in a scattering of hotels and bed-and-breakfasts, and then joined the second part being a coach trip to The Family Seat (now an expensive hotel-spa) for a couple more nights, though probably not paying £200 per night at the hotel-spa! It was good to meet first and second cousins and their various removes. Not to mention Uncles and Aunts and more distant relatives. 

I've also now just finished week 3 of an on-line course with futurelearn on writing fiction, which, as you can imagine, is fairly time-consuming.

The final straw may be putting myself down on the practise challenge chart at the school; I haven't been doing proper piano practice for some months now, and the shame of not earning a sticker each week is certainly a potent incentive. I have promised myself that I won't cheat. Better get back to that Chopin; there's a young lad tomorrow who want to know if I've reached bar 9 yet.