the carnival is over

Well, the Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair for 2011 is done and dusted! We had a great time. I really enjoyed meeting so many wonderful customers and spending the five days with Janie and Belinda. It was lots of fun and especially over the final few days (as we were getting more and more deliriously tired) we shared a lot of laughs!

It was an absolute pleasure to meet some of the people who read this blog. Thank you so much for making yourselves known to me! I was also visited by some past students, and it was good to hear what they’re up to these days.

For those of you who weren’t there, here’s a photo of my section of the stand. It changed a little bit over the show, as I tweaked the display and reorganised things.

Yesterday in the morning I had a chat with a lady who was considering purchasing a copy of The Right-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion. She had a really good look through it and decided that it was something she could use and benefit from. In the afternoon, she came back especially to tell me that she’d been reading it over lunch and thought it was so wonderful that she had to come back and congratulate me on it. She said that she has many other stitch books, but that mine really stood out from the rest. I was so pleased that she made the effort to come back to tell me! Its one thing to enjoy a book, but its another to let the author know just how much you enjoy it!

On each of the five days I taught a 1 hour class on basic embroidery for left-handers. I love teaching this class, as often the students have had less than happy experiences in classes before. Some of them related stories of how they have paid their money to attend classes then at the class had embroidery teachers walk away from them saying that they cannot help them as the student is left-handed. (I’m sorry, but that’s just not good enough, and it makes me very cross!)

Anyway, it was great to see their delight at having a left-handed teacher and learning the stitches in a left-handed manner. They all went away very satisfied, knowing that they too can do embroidery, even though they are left-handed!

One of the nicest things about my left-handed class was the fact that I taught about 6 students who were younger than me. This doesn’t happen very often, so it is always a thrill to know that my skills are being passed on to a younger generation.

There was a lot of interest in my Portuguese whitework book, with many people gathering around during my stitching demonstrations at the stand. Many people mentioned how much they are looking forward to the book being available – so am I!

And on that note, I’d better get back on with writing it, now that the carnival (show!) is over.