Distractions, distractions...

There are times when I think I must be knitting very slowly. Now is one of those times. I'm knitting things which aren't inspiring me and I feel like I'm never going to get to the end of them. When I hit a moment of self-doubt, I realise there are distractions which are keeping me away from my knitting (aside from reading my favourite knitting blogs of course - I can waste literally hours doing that). The distractions in question are shown above. First was my wonderful evening at my friend Helen's house doing "glitter and glue". Now, as a pre-school teacher, initially the thought of yet more glitter and glue did not hold much appeal. However, when Helen showed me some of her home-made cards, I was hooked. The first photo shows a completed card I made. The second photo is a sheet of mosaic style tissue paper, mulberry paper, glitter, glue and fusible fibre from which I will select little windows to stick onto cards. The overall effect is beautiful and, despite all sorts of self-doubts before I started, the process was liberating and fun, demanding very little skill.

The second distraction involved scissors and my counting skills. I volunteered to cut up 34 yellow card teddies with their corresponding legs and arms (if teddies can be classed as having arms??) - all 132 of them - for playgroup. Having recently cut out 34 teapot cards out of the same yellow carad, I will be glad never to see yellow card ever again!!! On top of this I have volunteered to count Tesco "computers for Schools" vouchers into neat piles of 100 vouchers for my children's infant school. The piles of blue vochers represent only a small part of the vouchers counted so far (something like 2500 and counting). And I wonder why I don't get enough knitting done??

And then came Sunday 6 April which brought snow. We don't get snow here very much and when we do, the sugar coating we get barely counts as snow (although it does have the capacity to bring the region to a grinding halt...). Sunday was a whole different ball game. In an hour we had 2.5 inches of snow. So, it called for photography, snowman making and snowball fights with our children. Wonderful, childlike fun which was therapeutic and exhilerating. We all got red faces and ears, soggy gloves and wet knees. But had a ball. So I didn't get to do much knitting that day. Instead, I got a couple of hourse of laughter and excitement shared with my 7 and 5 year olds. I call that a good deal.