Lalla

Yes, landing in the sea seems to happen all the time! I think instruction writers often forget to put themselves in the shoes of those who don’t know something; it’s hard when you DO know something to remember what it was like before you learnt it, and easy to make assumptions about the expertise of your reader/student. I taught myself as I went along when I was doing the embroidery book, so I didn’t know any more as I was working things out than any subsequent reader of my instructions on HOW I worked it out. Which is actually quite a good way of doing things because the empathy is there - the frustration, the bafflement, the eventual success, the whole learning curve. And if it’s stuff your reader does already known fine, they can just skip to the next bit. It’s the leaving out of things that makes for poor instruction, that and, as you say, poor ‘sentence co-ordination’ and organisational skills. Which makes one value a good instructor all the more, and strive to be one oneself if ever one is doing the instructing. And thank you, yes, I’m safe and hope you, and everyone else out there, is too. Such times we are living through. I do strongly feel, though, that us ‘makers’ are the lucky ones, in so many situations. We always have something to turn to that is more or less a therapy in times of stress, something we can always do for ourselves, something creative when we need to be creative, or just plain repetitively soothing when repetition is all we are in the mood for. Sorry side-tracking, everyone, but maybe here’s as good a place as any to wax philosophical about the joys of our shared endeavour.