Wrapping it up…

I’m all packed.  For the most part.  I’m leaving early in the morning for Green Bay Wisconsin, via Minn/St. Paul, where I’ll be picked up and driven two hours north, through Door County, hop a ferry, and end up, if all goes as scheduled, at Sievers Fiber School on Washington Island, WI, tomorrow night.  I love this island.  It is pretty remote, and fall is the end of the tourist season, there isn’t much going on there but the Fiber School and the fall air and turning leaves.  It is a fabulous time to travel to this island.

I managed to streamline what I needed to take.  I went through all my lists, eliminating anything that I deemed non essential.  I have to fit all my teaching materials into two 50 pound bags, not my usual 70.  I’m not flying my usual airline, where I have baggage perks, though Northwest is a codeshare of Continental, at least for another 10 days, until they part company, so my elite status on Continental got me a first class upgrade for the trip from Newark to Minneapolis.  The trip to Green Bay is on a little RJ jet, so there is no first class cabin.  I actually like to fly RJ’s, sort of like a bus in the air, they are quick, easy to board and deplane, no baggage to drag on board, it doesn’t fit, and I love the single seats on the left of the plane.

I did manage to get nearly all the proposals for the American Sewing Guild conference written, and I made a couple of placemats to see if it was possible to do this piecing technique I do, in four hours or less.  I don’t really offer any hands on workshops that can be done in four hours.  Maybe the inkle loom class, but that’s it.  So I finished a mat, and shot a photo of it, for the proposal, and then my husband walked in.  He is such an engineer.  He picked it up and looked at it carefully, turning it over, and said, in his methodical engineer voice, “Can you wash it?”.

OK, of course this will be an issue, and of course I’ll have to throw these two puppies into the machine to see what happens to all the components and my construction skills once they swish around in the wash, but that wasn’t the response I was looking for.  Yet, my engineer husband has kept me grounded and focused on practical issues for our 35 years together, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything, but I still hate when his first response is, “Can they be washed”, and not “Wow, this is so cool”.  ( note to husband who is reading this at some point, “I love you!” He gets to find out what I’m up to squirreled away in my studio by reading my blog.)  And of course, my engineer husband, in short order, figured out why my new Eee PC had to recover twice from the blue screen of death, while I was updating all my lectures and files before I set out tomorrow. Something that had to do with parental controls?  I am incredibly spoiled married to a techie.

So, I’m off tomorrow, to a place with no internet service.  There will be a computer in the office at Sievers, but no wireless, and they are still sadly on dial-up.  So I’ll be vacationing from blogging for a week while I focus on my students and teaching them whatever I can about sewing, designing, fitting, pattern alterations, and life, should they ask…  At least my opinion of it anyway!

And, while I’m away, I have a feeling that my husband and my daughter will be madly shoring up our fencing because I think, I’ve been weakened sufficiently to finally say, albeit quietly, it is OK for my daughter to bring a dog into the house.  I did last a whole year, my daughter works in a kennel, and has been working on me for the last year to replace the dog we had to put down back in 2007.  It all started with the fact that the kennel, where she works, breeds Norwegian Elk hounds, which I adore, almost as much as I adore Siberian Husky’s (our first dog was a husky, a male, mellowest dog you’d ever want to hang with).  They have 5 girls in heat, and have to move some of the males off the premises quickly.  And you know once the dog comes into this house, it will be staying for the next 10 years or so…  So I’m not sure what I’ll find when I return next Friday night, we will all be surprised!  Stay tuned…