It's not an omen

All through my schooldays I thought I'd be a teacher. Some of my favourite people were teachers. My father was a teacher. Most of the adults I witnessed doing their jobs were teachers. Eventually I thought I'd be a research chemist, but one degree later I was clear that this was another misguided ambition. I'm pretty sure now, with the benefit of an awful lot of hindsight, that my ambition should have been to become a textile historian/conservator. Next time.

Yesterday I had a play date with my textile buddies. There's just three of us left now, and it was the thirteenth anniversary of our first meeting. We were all signed up for a series of monthly workshops on printing and dyeing, a one year course that lasted for three. I worked with J on the first day, and we were meant to be paired up, ignoring rules, eyeballing quantities instead of measuring, leaping into things without stopping to think. S became part of the team gradually, even though she measures and thinks ahead and resists making things up as she goes along. We get together for play dates, for excursions, for knitting & nattering or stitching & bitching, and we always plan to make it every month, though the reality is more like five or six times a year.

In 2024 we only managed a single meeting, right at the end of January when I was still struggling with recovery from covid, and all I managed was a few rows of knitting. After that, the year got worse for me and was completely traumatic for J. In twelve months two different members of her immediate family have, on three separate occasions, been so dangerously ill that their survival was in doubt. She's supported more than one of her children through relationship breakdowns and her sister through breast cancer and managing a husband with serious dementia. I think there's more, but I forget the details. She's exhausted, profoundly exhausted and, despite being a remarkably intelligent and capable person, her brain is really not working well right now. Making arrangements and explaining things to her is a struggle. I do hope she'll get some breathing space soon to look after herself and begin to heal from all this.

I wanted to make things easy yesterday, for all of us, but for J in particular. I declined offers of contributions to lunch, and found the perfect project, something we could sit and sew whilst we talked. It had to be something requiring enough attention to be interesting, but not too much attention. I chose a little 'pinch purse' as demonstrated in this video by Arounna Khounnoraj. I printed instructions, cut out templates and stiffening and wadding, sewed little fabric 'work baskets' so I could present everything in kits. I chose a wide selection of suitable fabrics from my stash, so S and J could have the pleasure of browsing, I made sure that everything they needed was there in front of them, and I did a trial run to ensure I was competent to lead the party.

Everything worked out just the way I hoped, and I think they felt all the love I'd put into planning and preparing but, oh my, the exhaustion. The effort required to be one step ahead of two people moving at completely different speeds. The disrupted thought processes as J asked me, again and again, to remind her of the next step, to repeat what I'd just said. It's been a whole day and I'm still not over it.

Teachers are superheroes and I was never going to make the grade.

Some pics of my cute sample: