Hell of a week!

Well, what a busy week it's been! I'm back at school again, college started last week and my evening course is in full swing, one evening a week plus Saturdays too. I'm working 1:1 with two students with Aspergers at college, which can be a little intensive, my GSCE and portfolio students at school have just started this week, so I've been giving them all the introduction to the course and some basic art skills, and on my TESOL evening course I'm learning Gudjerati as part of the Unknown Language unit. I can now count to 15, greet someone, order fruit at the market and tell someone which part of my body hurts! Essential skills! I have a presentation to give in a few weeks about present perfect tenses and a guided observation coming up. I've also contracted the BTSV - otherwise known as the Back To School Virus! You spend all year building your immunity up to the many bugs that teenagers seem to culture like little petri dishes, you have the whole summer away from them in your own sweet little world, then it's back to school and your immune system just can't cope - wham! The worst cold/flu you can imagine. My immune system's compromised as it is, so I hate this time of year! My head's thumping, I can't breathe and I have that sore throaty, ear achey feeling that tells you that there's more to come!

School is kind of interesting at the moment, we have more Eastern Europeans this year, and less Oriental. I've had my first students from Kazakhstan this week! It's so weird, they look oriental in skin tone and eye shape, but they are taller and have almost Russian accents. The whole dynamics of the classroom have changed; before the classroom was predominantly Oriental, naturally a very quiet group of people, and now we have more Eastern European too - Polish, Russian, Latvian, and Ukrainian, to name a few - and they are so much more chatty and lively! I've had to raise my voice several times this week, which is unheard of!!

I've been doing photograms at college again. This weeks task was to bring in objects that identified you as you. Mine incorporated a leaf, a flower, a lightly woven scarf and some jewellery. I rather like this one, it has lots of texture to it.

I received my academic diary which is, as always, a boring black colour, so I decided to make a cover for it. I was going to use the cover that Lynda made me, but alas, it didn't fit the diary. I had this gorgeous gold swirled, turquoise and emerald fabric stashed, and a lovely turquoise cotton that Sunspotted sent me in one of the OWS swaps which matched perfectly so off I went.

I overlocked (serged) the edges and folded over the top and bottom. Then I created a pocket flap at either end for the diary cover to slide into and serged those.

And here we go, a much prettier diary. I want to put some elastic on it to hold it closed whilst it's travelling in my bag. I always end up with lots of pieces of paper, timetable changes, stuff like that, tucked into the back of my diary, so a piece of elastic will stop those being lost too. I want to get some gold elastic, which I thought I had in my stash, but apparently not, so I guess a trip to Hobbycraft is called for!

I also whipped up another book bag. This one just needs embellishing, I've serged the edges together to make it super strong and I'll probably applique something on it. This is intended for bigger books - I have a big one in my car at the moment that I take to the hospital with me when I go for appointments and blood tests and it's getting a little dog eared!.

I'm making slow progress with my various knitting projects, but they are progressing. Life's just a little hectic at the moment. I'm looking forward to a lie-in tomorrow. Anyway, time for bed. Enjoy the rest of the weekend!