On line learning

*WARNING - potentially quite boring blog below, the vast girth of my tummy inhibits much in the way of upholstery or adventure*

About a year ago in a fever of industriousness I signed up for an online diploma in interior design at the London based interiors school, KLC. It's a brilliant school which gets brilliant results but it is a really intensive course. The problem with online learning is that all the impetus and motivation needs to come from you; I have a massive folder of lecture notes, I have an online account with lots of useful information and I have a timetable which prescribed that the first piece of work was meant to be handed in last September! Needless to say I fell a little behind and said first piece of course work has just been completed.
The project brief was to define your personal style through a series of images and objects which should then be collated and annotated in a scrap book and eventually be reduced down to a manageable size and mounted on a board with the intention of encapsulating one's "personal style"!

Anyone who is familiar with online learning will no doubt sympathise. Basically you have no lectures and no human interaction: it's all done via the wonders of the internet. The plus side to this is, of course, that the prohibitively expensive course becomes very affordable and I have always wanted to know more about the professional side of interior design.

I have to say that when I had the time to devote the required attention to the project, I really enjoyed it (yes, the supposedly early baby is still to make an appearance!)And have been happily doodling and getting colour schemes together and thinking about my favourite products and what inspires me. It's especially good to do it at the moment as I've been thinking so much about the house recently.

Choosing the images which best summarised my personal style was hard and once I had chosen them, I had to analyse my choices, hence all the waffle below..

.. and this is only one page of about twenty!

If you read my blog regularly you probably know that I teach in a primary school three days a week and upholster chairs the rest of the time which works very well indeed and keeps me ticking along financially, creatively and intellectually (teaching English to precociously intelligent eleven year olds is no walk in the park, I can tell you!)That said, I increasingly would like to branch out into interior design and thought this course would be an excellent way of getting a bit more of a professional grounding. My idea is to use our new house as a bit of a show piece and if people like my style then maybe they will want to employ me to help them do up their own abode. I have in mind that maternity leave will be the perfect opportunity to launch this new aspect to my career but in my heart of hearts know that once the little one does decide to show up for the party, I will most likely spend the first few months drowning in dirty nappies and breast pads.. and the house will most certainly not be a show home! Anyway, watch this space and I'll hopefully be able to show you another piece of completed coursework in the not too distant future.

Happy Easter everyone xx