Patterns in Space and Time

As if all that confectionery and bakingness weren't enough on the sticky front, I then decided to get up to my neck in self-adhesive tiles and glue and ribbons and fabric and buttons.  Don't get me wrong, I have no aversion to sticky messes; I'm not known for being a fastidious, clean-liking, anti-muck sort of person.  You ask my mother.  She has, I'm sure, very fond memories of mud-pies and me volunteering to black-pot all the pans after Guide Camp.  Pretty sure I was sent outside with a brillo pad and buckets of water and left to my own devices with that job.  And my father will tell you unpleasant tales of mould in mugs.  My assertions that this was how Louis Pasteur discovered penicillin were not welcomed, if I remember rightly. 

A n y w a y...so I don't usually mind 

a bit of muck.  

I was making a noticeboard in my sewing room.  I like to see things - sketches, plans, pictures, fabrics, notes, ideas and so on, or I simply forget what I'm doing.  I have come to the conclusion that this is largely because I do not have a good memory.  Alternatively, it might be because I have about 87 ideas all cramming themselves into my head at any one time.  And I forget what I'm doing.  Also, I have very limited time in which to do them, what with the fact that I'm actually meant to be looking after two small children, so it is difficult to build up any momentum.  Right now, for example one of the children is blowing a whistle very loudly in the other one's ear, one is taking its vest and shoes off, and another is walking round the house with an umbrella up.  Hang on, that's three, and I've only got two.  One must have been doing two of those things.

Not really focussing on the task at hand am I?

And I'm not actually terribly good at multi-tasking.  I would be if I could wear a clipboard round my neck and keep a note of everything I was doing all at once, but it really would get in the way.

For the last hour, the clipboard would read:

• Sort out bag of clothes for freecycle lady to pick up
  
• Cut Isla's fringe
• Cut Hetty's too, because she'll want to do the same as Isla
• Find coins for them to pay me with at the salon
• Play Humpty Dumpty on the ipod
• Put Isla's jumper back on
• Supervise a poo
• Try to make a nice cup of tea
• Supervise another poo
• Unload dishwasher
• Load dishwasher
• Try again to make a nice cup of tea
• Unload washing machine
• Load washing machine
• Unload tumble dryer
• Load tumble dryer
• Get really bored of loading and unloading things and decide to make labels for all the toy trays
• Try once more to make a nice cup of tea
• Wish I had a laminator for the toy tray labels
• Explain to Hetty that her tights don't have pockets for her hairdresser money
• Remind myself to call my mother and ask her how the devil I'm going to unpick two accidental overdoses of cable stitch in my knitting 
• Really wish I could get round to making a cup of tea

It's a bit scatterbrained, but that's what life is like with little ones.

The noticeboard looks very nice from not too close up - get too close and you'll see some shoddy fabric-sticking and distinctly glue-sodden ribbons (which I picked up for 20p each in a charity shop, although at that point they were not sodden), but it is exactly what I wanted.

First thing I shall pin up there: my attempts to design a pattern for a hairband - you can see my four failed attempts pinned on it.  Four.  I mean, that is ridiculous.  My hairbands are a comedy of errors.  I like to stick the evidence of my constant inability to get the maths right in view, to spur me on, and in the hope that some random person will have just the right sized bonkers head to put one of them on.  Either bizarrely small, or in the case of one - man-sized tennis player size.  I'm pretty sure quantum mechanics is involved, on account of the use of elastic, elastic being an odd, warping, bending sort of substance, much like time and space and atoms and worm-holes, and other particle-type things of which I know very little.  

I'd better brush up on my physics.