"Could Do Better..."

Back in school, I was one of those annoying students who got top marks in everything with very little effort - you know the type!  However, there were two things I was definitely bottom of the class at, sports and handwriting.  I went to a tiny little school in Alderney, one of the Channel Islands.  So tiny, there were 7 children in my year group - when the flu virus went round, at one point there was just me and I had to be put with another year group just to make up numbers.

But I digress.  Once a week on a Monday morning, the whole of the upper school had to do a handwriting test.  If our efforts did not measure up, we were sent to a remedial group for practice. Can I just say, I was in that remedial group for years.....I can paint with precision, I can knit and sew tiny things, I can make jewellery using the smallest of beads, but I still cannot tame my handwriting into legibility.  Yesterday it came back to bite me in the behind.  I spent three hours (three hours) trying to find out why a knitting pattern I had written and sold was proving to be inexplicable to my customer.  After two trial knits and going over the pattern and my handwritten notes, I finally identified the problem - I hadn't been able to decipher my own writing when transcribing my notes and had typed a couple of silly errors, thus throwing the whole thing into disarray. Sigh....Oh well, I'm glad someone had the sense to query it which gave me the opportunity to correct the pattern. 

Thankfully, this was a pattern from a couple of years ago when I was first writing them down - since getting two jobs involving keeping meticulous notes on my designs, I make sure to write clearly these days.  Well, as clear as is humanly possible for me at least!

I'm better at using a paintbrush - this is a tiny section of a commission I am working on at the moment.  The brief is to combine precise drawing with lots of dribbles and splashes.  It's proving to be a lot of fun, although I'm having to make sure I cover myself up before throwing paint around as Inktense does not come out of clothing once it is on there!