Wednesday 22nd March - Reaching for the Stars - setting targets

I am picking up on suggestions from various piano teaching blogs that I follow to create a sort of individual challenge for my piano pupils to each play me ten pieces by the Summer Term, four months away. I shall let them all know next week, the last lesson before Easter for most of them, although I did mention it to one student last week.

To my great delight, we started her lesson today with a piece that she found in one of her old piano books, and made an excellent start on. I had said that the ten pieces didn't have to be difficult ones, in fact it was a good idea to choose much easier ones that the current works in progress.

She thought that ten pieces was too big a challenge, and maybe just five or six was more realistic. After a bit of discussion, she grasped that this wasn't meant to be a HUGE challenge, but a series of 'little wins'; The first section of Fur Elise makes a nice little piece on its own, and is actually really straightforward to memorize, although that isn't part of the challenge.

I think too many people, children and adults, have been brought up to think that we should strive for the furthest, 'bestest' thing we can attain. Insisting on a Rolls Royce, when a bicycle would probably do the job. Fetching a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. Somewhere I read that 'nothing succeeds like success'; so whatever I am doing, being it changing the bed sheets or learning a Bach Fugue, I break the task up into a series of little wins.

'I've changed the pillowcases' - that will do for today.

'I can play the first 2 bars' - excellent.

This applies to becoming more breathless - indeed, to ageing in general. Instead of looking at the whole task, I plan how to accomplish it in easily managed and completed stages.

I'll do the 'ten pieces' challenge as well; I'll have a look through my old books and revive some favourites, and maybe finish learning a few things I started...

The 'little wins' way is the only way I have been able to come anywhere near completing this month's cross-stitch. I divided it into the six main areas by colour and did each of them. Now I am now adding in detail which is rather more freehand than the phrase 'counted thread cross-stitch' might imply. Again, there are six main areas for detail. I started with the simplest and am working through the stages of complexity, leaving the as yet 'unfathomed' section until last. 

The magnifying glass is making all the difference. That, and remembering to blink every so often.

I've given myself a glaringly obvious colour gradient issue to solve. Do I cut out a huge area and restitch it? Or do I somehow do something to make it look as though I meant it all along? People who know me will know which option I am mostly likely to go for! 

Whatever I do, it will have to wait until I have more time tomorrow. Not every day can be a cross stitch day.   

I am already thinking of a Really Simple Idea for next month. I wonder if one piece of Aida is going to be full of complex and time-consuming pictures, and the other piece will be all 'I can't go through all that again, here's a quicker stitch' pictures, as we alternate between doing something intricate and time-consuming, and something much, much simpler as a respite?