Public speaking is not my forte

Well today I had to do a presentation for our Recovery College at work.  I’ve always had a massive dread of speaking in public and over the years I’ve managed to combat my fears to a degree.  Today was not one of those days.  We had to teach a room of people something, it could be anything at all.  So I thought well obviously I’m going to dive right in and teach something I’m passionate about and that’s knitting.  ❤️

I’ve been so busy I hadn’t managed to put anything together, in fact yesterday I talked myself out of it completely which left me at 11am today frantically throwing a power point presentation together for the session at 1pm!  I must of known deep down that I’d do it because I took a bag of knitting needles and wool in my car with me this morning ‘just in case’.

I decided to briefly chat about different yarns, different knitting needles, and different knitting techniques. As it was mainly men in the room I jabbered on about how men knit too and flashed up some Instagram accounts of male knitters.  I also covered how it helps anxiety and depression and showed an article in a magazine of how one guy used knitting to quit smoking. Sounds good so far? It was going swimmingly if you ignored my quavering voice and hands flapping around everywhere as I talked! Then I dished out a set of needles to everyone and a ball of wool and a diagram of how to cast on and thought now this should be the fun part....... how difficult can it be to teach 8 people how to cast on ??? Well let me tell you , VERY!!! Half of them couldn’t even do the initial knot ! I ended up running from person to person my huge 20mm demo needles abandoned on the chair while I frantically tried to help each person cast on the first stitch.  Let’s just say I don’t think I will have any takers for my knitting class out of that bunch.  I was amazed how difficult they all thought it was.  What I take for granted is clearly not easy for everyone. I imagined showing them how to cast on 5 or so stitches then perhaps progressing on to a few rows! 😳

I think they were all as grateful as I was to chuck the needles back into the proffered bag and give me a round of applause. Even though I think it was a pity applaud. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Hey ho I passed the course anyway, something else to go on my cv and I also kind of learnt how to do the floss dance, float a paper clip in water, fold a paper square for origami and do some yoga breathing. Bonus.

I took my lovely Bergere De France jacket to show off as I’m quite proud of it, 😊 even more so now.