Jill of All Trades

This week I taught in school every day and hardly touched fabric at all. Despite being so busy, I found that I was forced to focus, working concertedly and ticking items off lists. My teaching was varied and very off the cuff. It covered almost every age range and involved just about everything from adding 10 000 and Vikings to The Paralympics and World War II. One morning I was given 5 minutes notice that I would be the French specialist for the morning without the aid of dictionaries or any other teaching material. I decided to wing it, put on a French accent and say, "Bonjour La Classe!" authoritatively. After doing a bit of counting and revision of greetings we did comic strips of a French folk tale and I seemed to get away with it quite convincingly. I secretly enjoyed flitting in and out of all of the different classes but I have decided that the maximum that I want to spend in classrooms is more like two and a half days each week.

I eventually found half an hour to cut fabric for the remaining 2 borders on the Oz version of Bewitched and I even sewed a few seams in between answering calls about longarm machines and planning for next week's primary school sex education lessons. My reward at the end of such a busy week was to book my flights to Houston and share a glass or two of wine with Tania. 

I intended to do some piecing at the weekend but I immersed myself in a side project, painting an old, brown varnished cupboard. There was a time when I would have sanded it all down and used eggshell paint but I decided to use chalky "Annie Sloan" paint that has been specially formulated to use straight onto any old wood without any preparation. I was amazed at how well it turned out and made my ugly Edwardian piece look elegantly French. I ran up simple grey gingham curtains to hide the children's art stuff inside the cupboard then got completely carried away and also painted the ancient hostess trolley that can be used if I ever decide to have a dinner party but in reality is where Blue Cat keeps a spare box of cat biscuits. 

Instead of sitting at my sewing machine on Sunday I found myself in Aberdeen again since the bus that Freya wanted to catch into the city failed to appear. We collected her new ukelele then I plucked up the courage to go into the Apple Store and I bought a Mac Book Pro! My Windows laptop has been driving me crazy so I am hopeful that once I have got all of the new commands sussed and moved over all of my documents and contacts, I will not keep mysteriously losing documents. I have a few articles to write and I plan to produce a simple Yurt brochure for Houston so my fingers should be kept busy clicking!