Day 10 - Christmas is coming and my projects need to get done!

I have one sleeve to finish for the baby sweater model, the wrap is done and around my shoulders, I finished 2 hats, and a purse but I haven't worked on either of the sweaters for the two grandkids that have sweaters promised, haven't worked on my socks, haven't done any doll clothes yet and there is less then two weeks to go.

Josse starts her Cyber-agility class this week. And while she is taking the class, I am going to be working on the same exercises with Winnie. Winnie needs a refresher class before it is time to move to Modular 2 in Cyber Agility. Helix Fairweather has this Cyber program and this is our fourth dog to go through it. It is a clicker training based program and we have good results in using it as our agility foundation program.

In January we start back in Obedience and Josse will go to kindergarten. Hopefully it will be a warm winter for going back and forth to school. Dog training is really people training. The dogs have a very good idea of the moves, people need to learn their part and how to turn it into a 'dance'. When it finally works that trainer and dog work together as a team, you can feel it and it is grand. But we, humans, are the weak link in the partnership.

Teaching knitting is often the same. A knitting teacher's first job with the students is to figure out how each learns and then how to explain the system to them so that the student can learn with as few restarts as possible. It is such a joy to find a student that learns as I do. I am a visual person and it is so easy for me to relate to another visual person. It takes work to explain to other learning modalities. But after some 50 plus years of showing people how to wrap string around sticks, I have learned a lot about how to explain to people how the string becomes fabric. I haven't had any where near that amount of time working at learning how to be a team with a dog.

I haven't had any where near the 60 years of knitting experience that I have as a knitter, as a crocheter. I have always done a bit of crocheting but the last couple of years I have been trying to increase my crocheting ability. The last couple of years the yarn world has made that easier for me. Besides joining the Crochet Guild of America, I have signed the shop up for carrying a number of crochet magazines. We also get the new crochet books from a number of publishers and the selection of both have increased and improved. Today the new copy of Crochet Today came. This magazine is published by the Vogue knitting folks and is very good. It has inspired a number of crochet classes for next year. I can hardly wait to be able to teach some. Of course that adds projects to my already large pile. So it is off to the rocking chair in the corner with my hook and a ball of yarn.

Have a warm day!