It’s nearly time - only a couple more weeks - and the season for birch pollen (and friends) will be officially over. Hoo-bloomin’-ray. Me and my sore eyes and niffer can’t wait.
This year seems particularly bad. I thought after an ‘easy’ year last year, with almost no symptoms, maybe I’d been miraculously cured of my allergies (I also have the related ‘pollen food syndrome’ and can’t eat raw apple, peaches or apricots 😭). But no! 2025 has been horrendous. Since February, I’ve been double-dosing antihistamines, got through gallons of eye drops - even glued my eyes shut with overnight ointment, only to wake up in the darkest hours because I’ve been rubbing them in my sleep.
And now suddenly, it’s over. Just like in the depths of December we can’t imagine what it would be like to ever feel the sun on our skin again, I’d forgotten what it’s like to see clearly and have a nose that doesn’t dribble. Cause for celebration enough.
The other cause for celebration?
This year marks FIVE YEARS - oh-my-goodness-where-does-the-time-go - since I started to create online courses. Lockdown cancelled all my workshops: not something to celebrate per se, but a relief in a way because I’d totally overbooked myself. I could add, that as a late-diagnosed adult with ADHD, I’d spent far too long (decades) trying to fit the expectations of the wider world yet simultaneously wondering why it sometimes felt so difficult to get out there and do my thing. So for good or bad, everything about how I worked changed - and that I DO celebrate! And my very first online course? ‘Swirls of Colour’ - crazy that it’s five years ago!
My first little promo video ever!!! So that’s five years since I started a YouTube channel (and nearly five years since I uploaded anything new 🤣)
Five years ago, some of us were also busy stitching scrubs for the NHS…
I made myself a top the other day, to test a pattern. My daughter bought it to try and learn to sew something - and because it looked easy and I needed a distraction from what I should’ve been doing, I thought I’d give it a go.
It was only when I finished that I realised the colour, fabric drape (non-existent) and style made it look exactly like surgical scrubs. Gah! I’m thinking of tipping ink over it, tie-dyeing it somehow. Doing something wild. Not sure I’ve got any fabric dyes or paints, tempted to use acrylic ink. Could go horribly wrong, but nothing to lose…
The sleeves weren’t quite right anyway, a bit tight. Some snarky online comments suggest the pattern’s only suitable for people with stick-like arms, so that’s almost me: no muscle tone but still a reasonable amount of ‘flappage’ in the triceps…Anyhoo, I redrafted it (I’d already added 2” to the length anyway: I’m not 18 and feel no need to air my tummy) and tried again - this time with an old duvet cover from the stash, just to test. Still not convinced, so that’s now two tops I’ll never wear again and another week gone by…
It’s five years since we started trespassing walking on the old farmland destined for housing at the top of the hill. They’ve still not built the houses (we’re secretly longing for them to dig down and discover a Viking longship, or Roman mosaic) so we can still walk freely - especially now that catkin season is over and the sun is out at last.
Five years ago was a similar hot and sunny spring, and I remember sitting in the garden reading Cheryl Strayed’s ‘Wild’ for bookclub (meetings on Zoom, naturally). I bought a secondhand copy for my daughter recently, and she read it in a day, very speedy. Not a term you could apply to me finishing this second-go-round of the Swirls course…
Five years ago also marked a Big Birthday that also began with a 5. And this year, there’s another 5. So. I was thinking…how about we have another birthday celebration?! It also rather conveniently gives me a realistic-ish deadline to get this Swirls project over the line.
Why is it taking so long?
Five years is a lot of time to…
get used to being online for doing all the things, like this Threadnoodle and all the other iterations of my newsletter and blog over the years. I still feel like I’m experimenting with the internet, and as soon as I get used to one way of working, another new thing comes along. It’s distracting, and I don’t need any encouragement in that department.
get my head around the tech involved in making a course - a work in progress because it keeps changing and I keep learning.
get over my absolute terror of Zoom calls (something we’ve all had to get used to). Doing the podcast with Gina for a couple of years helped, but it’s another kettle of fish altogether to host your own more ‘public’ calls.
find a way to work with long deadlines of my own creation. Spoiler: I can’t.
It’s also ample time for even more ideas to swirl around in Izzy’s Brain, ideas that are too good to be left out of a second stab at it all. Which, funnily enough, is one of the reasons it’s taken so long. I had to work out how my ideas all fitted together to create a cohesive thing - a thing that’s as much fun as first time round, but with quite a lot of the gaps filled in. Gaps with things like colour, design, hand embroidery (as you know, not really my bag…until I start to do it, when suddenly I’m obsessed).
It is entirely possible I’m overthinking - or, as I like to call it - thinking.
I’ve also had my diagnosis of ADHD since then - another big reason why I can’t let anything go; everything has to be explored. Just like my hunt for the perfect scrubby fabric last week, I’m on a permanent hunt for all things ‘swirl’. Case in point: stopping to photograph these hart’s tongue ferns unfurling on a roadside bank in Wales:
And talking of ferns…
I stitched this little sample the other day as I was noodling around, filming for the course. I finished the video edit OK, then got utterly stuck choosing suitable muzak for the stitching. I add music because while I think it’s good to see the whole process, to see exactly how I stitch, nobody wants to listen to four or five minutes of my machine hammering along. But it must be the right music. I’m going to have fun with this idea for some Insta reels in the next week or so (watch out for them!) but meanwhile, here’s a sneek peek with the music I found. I think it’s rather lovely, and I’m going to add ‘cello’ to my music* search term from now on.
One last thing…
And maybe another thing to celebrate?!
If you took part in the original Swirls of Colour course (June 2020 to spring 2022) I’m going to be offering a whopping great alumni discount coupon to make it easy to join again, do all the new stuff - and this time, keep it**. How about 80% off - sound good?
All alumni coupons will be individual, so if this is you and you’d like a code - please message or email me! I can’t do this via mailing list or clicky links - every name will have to be cross-checked with my records from those original courses. It might take a while to do this (still no little elves in the background, only me) so I’m starting to mention this now in order to get our ducks in a row in good time. And please pass on the message, if you have friends who also took the course who might want to repeat.
I’m still tackling my Zoom fears, but the only way to not be scared is to do it anyway. So there’ll be that too. I’m also thinking, now I have a shiny new subscription - I could offer Zoomies more generally, for a bit of Threadnoodle time?
It terrifies me just asking that question, in case you say yes…
Until next time,
It’s back to the recording studio😅
I’m not announcing my Swirls deadline just yet, but now I’ve mentioned birthdays you could take a stab at it - if you know you know. There’s a lot of stuff that needs to happen between now and then, to get it all ready. There WILL be a wait list, and there will be coupons…and cake?! Stay subscribed to stay in the loop:
* I use a subscription music service called Storyblocks. My annual payment allows me unlimited downloads of royalty-free music that I’m licensed to use even if/when I stop my subs. There’s some really cool stuff of all styles, but it can be hard finding something appropriate for the genre, something not suddenly bombastic half-way through or too plunky or irritating or repetitive or loud…
** Previously, each run of the course had a year’s limit - and as you now know, my courses are lifetime access. The caveat being me not doing this online stuff absolutely forever, but certainly for the foreseeable. So not quite forever, but good-as. Oh, and before you ask - still working out a final price for the course, but it’ll be (very slightly) less than £300.
Lovely music & design.....
Go, go, go! I would love to be on the “waitlist” although I missed the first time around.