Weekend Report

This is a long post as my puter has been sick. It's had viruses, spyware, adware, and any other disease that a computer can get. SOoooo after an expensive purchase of a viruse suite (which they tell me kills ALL of the above), I now have things back on track... well almost...

As planned, I moseyed on over to the Stitches and Craft Show after dropping B off at work in at 9am. I couldn't believe it. I knew that I'd be early, and figured I find a coffee, review the schedule of workshops and make my way over at 10am when it opened. As it happened, the ticket booths were open when I got there (around 9.30am) and they were allowing people in the gate, but not into the building. So in I went to get my coffee and sit down and wait, only to find nearly 100 people lined up at the first door. Why do people insist on lining up? Their tickets had already been taken, so when the doors opened, it was just a matter of moving in - no need for lines!!

Anyway, lines and peoples pigheadedness to be in the door first aside, I had a good day. I'd done my homework and decided on which workshops and seminars that I'd go to and off I went.

I did a machine embroidery and embellishment seminar run by Punch with Judy, which was mostly telling us about their new products, which was quite good. Admittedly I didn't get as thrilled about the patchwork stuff as the others, but I did find some things of benefit. As a result of that workshop (as well as already having a desire to try such things prior to the event) I purchased a 'stencil cutter' which is really a soldering iron with the tip bent at right-angles to make it easier to work with. Of course my use is burning and cutting fabric, rather than stencils as Arlee would attest to - check out her flowers where she has used a soldering iron to cut out sheer fabric.

Next I spent a bit of time wandering amongst the exhibits a perusing the glorious "stuff"!!. Whilst I looked at all the lovely fabrics, I avoided purchasing any as I now have the abilty to dye fabrics and tend to prefer this. I've decided that when I need other fabrics, that I will shop for them then, rather than collecting bundles of fat quaters that I'll never use. This theory stands until I see something particulary special, like the japanese fabrics I bought at a recent quilt show - but that's different *grin*

The next seminar wasn't really what I thought it would be. I saw machine embroidery and though FREE mcahine embroidery. It wasn't!! It was programmed machine embroidery but not bad just the same. A lot of the stuff talked about, could be applied to free machining, but there wasn't any real 'techniques' for me to pick up.

Lastly I went to Gloria McKinnon's cloth doll talk. Gloria is from Annes Glory Box and has an array of dolls from country to art and everything in between. She even has a few by Eleanor Peace-Bailey both finished and in progress to show how she does her faces. I think that I've been to this talk before, but i like looking at the dolls, and you never know what you might pick-up. This time I discovered that the prismacolour pencils that I use to do faces with, should be set with an iron. Well not exactly set but they become brighter and the colours merge when heated with an iron.

So all-in-all I came away without having spent too much, of which I am very proud, considering that I was there for around 6 hours.

In other news (non-textile-news) I spent Saturday night at my brothers place. It was a fairly quiet night as B and I had to work in the morning, and to top it off we has an extra 45 minute drive from L & S's place to get there.