It is all very well waking up at 4am with a whirl of things to be done on your mind but if you are too tired to get up and sort them out it is a bit pointless and very annoying! I may have to blame this nocturnal brain energy on my latest online purchase of very strong Arabic coffee laced with cardamon, providing me with highly addictive rocket fuel. All week I felt that I was not making visible progress but when I wrote a checklist that could be ticked off, I was reasonably pleased.
I kept up the momentum with my Ebook material and drafted various rough sections that I can work on. My editor is trying to make me stay focussed on the type of book and engage with my audience. I will endeavour to follow her sage advice since no-one has ever made suggestions about my ramblings before. I have also made contact with two professional photographers to ensure that the close-up shots are crisp and well lit and it gives me a more definite deadline if I know that someone is being paid to come to take photos for a limited period of time.
My two school days were jam-packed with activities and I lost count of the number of times I heard my name being called. I am probably trying to cram far too much into my curriculum; it is tricky juggling keeping track of reading-books while teaching 6 year olds how to make soup and operate a sewing machine. I enjoyed playing fiddle with the Banchory Strathspey Society so much on Thursday evening that I decided to order a set of new strings for the first time in 25 years. I wonder if that will dramatically improve my performance?!
In my “spare” time I picked several bags of blackberries and put them straight into the freezer to be made into crumble, jam or liqueur later. I got rather annoyed with my new longarm machine as it is giving me a thread tension headache. I never had to think about that with my grumpy, old machine so we had a bit of a falling-out. It has a larger bobbin than before and a thread break sensor and seems to be far too posh and fussy for its own good. I will just have to show it who is the boss...
I have now made 8 wonky strip-sets for the berry and heather inspired trio of totems and think I need around 6 more. Although they do not look complicated, each one takes about an hour to construct. I am aiming to complete the whole Henge of Totems by next May so I can consider entering them into a show or two. I will need several very large boxes to ship this series!
I received good news that Odin’s Trilogy has been juried into MQX West and Norma from Wisconsin sent me pictures from Quilt Expo in Madison of the USA Yurt attracting crowds of curious quilters. Suzanne Labry in Texas sent me a link to a super article on the Yurt that she wrote following its appearance in Houston last November.
There was an email from Generation Q magazine to let me know that there will be a feature about the Coracle in November and that they will send me a copy.
I was not quite as impressed with the official photos that FOQ finally posted on the Press section of their website this week. The colours were definitely not right and the pictures did not do any of the pieces justice. These photos were reproduced in QGBI’s rather serious journal, The Quilter. I am hopeful that the other independent quilt magazines in the UK will publish better ones.
On Sunday evening as I write a new list for the forthcoming week I am gearing myself up to go to a gig in a pub for the first time in a few years. Freya and I are off to see local band, Victoria Sponge, in action. I should think I will probably need a pint of that new coffee tomorrow morning ;)
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