19. Project Report

19. Project Report

I included this prompt as a moment to check in with how things are going. As I look at my learning goals for September, I see it’s not all gone exactly to plan, but that studying in each area is progressing. There are some unexpected learnings, too. I wanted to share a progress report that is encouraging and focuses on the wins!

1. Photography. I want to do more with the digital single-lens-reflex camera that my brother lent me. I did take some nice photos yesterday of my music box and punch-cards featuring knitting patterns. At the XMTR.FM festival I’ll be showing knitting patterns we can hear in Beach Hut No. 15 on Friday 27th, 2-4pm. Join me to listen to knitting patterns or make your own punch-card! And if you don’t know what I’m on about, check out this post in which I talk about the componium (music box) and how we can play knitting patterns on it!

2. Creative Recovery. I’m enjoying Morning Posters a lot, and finding it is – as hoped – giving me an outlet for everything to come out onto the page, but has none of the misery/rumination/mental health badness of the Morning Pages. Hurrah! My favourite strategy is to blob lots of colours onto the pages and then wait for them to dry and use them as a starting point for getting some words and thoughts out in a not-overthinking-it-way.

3. Smartphone usage Regulation. This is frankly not helped by trying to run an instagram challenge! But I need more people to find and know my work for my business to survive, and so must find ways to use social media that are sustainable and enable me to share my work in an ongoing way. So I’m learning lots about how to do that, in my own way and I have to say that working on these posts has been a lot of fun and a really rich opportunity to reflect on all sorts of facets of learning, which will feed back into how I run my school. So it’s all good. Deleting the app after reading and responding to all your amazing #KNITSONIKbacktoschool posts keeps me intentional, along with finding new morning habits that don’t involve instantly going on my phone and getting caught up in the doom scroll.

I love Catherine Price’s clear and not too wordy approach, and setting a daily timer to check in with myself each day for 10 minutes has been invaluable.

4. Sound and Music. I’ve not had the bandwidth to dig back into my amazing Point Blank Music School course so far this month, but I tidied up my archive of sheep recordings and located my very precious first sheep recordings – made here in Sussex sixteen years ago with Julia Desch and her beautiful Wensleydales.

The Knitted Speakers I talked about in this post are taking a long time to repair, and I sadly can’t get them working in time for the XMTR.FM festival as I had hoped. It just takes a very long time to undo all the knitting, check all the solder joins, and then repair all the coverings… and there are some really bad crackles and hums that do not go well with my lovely sheep sounds from Sussex, Cumbria, Shetland and Estonia. Nevertherless, getting them out and working on them – and their associated library of sounds – has reignited my love for the special thing that happens when you combine the sounds of certain sheep with their lovely wool.

How are your learning plans going so far?