Education Week - Day Three

Another super successful day!

My head is just spinning with what can be done with a sewing machine.

I went for a walk in the morning. It was minus 2, but the brisk walk was great and I almost made my 10,000 steps for the day. Everyone is pretty friendly around here. The crossing guard said HI, as did the one other person that I met along the way.

We started off the day with a show n tell. At first, I thought I was going to be totally intimidated by what the others have shown, but I'm very proud of the two items I brought. One is an item that I created for QUILTsocial where I did embroidery and then created a wall hanging using the embroidery and quilted it. Here's the link to the embroidery in case you didn't see it. This link shows when I assembled the wall hanging. There are two links to the quilting process. Here's the first one and here's the second one.

I can't share the second one with you. I currently only have a picture of it - the actual item is being photographed for a magazine and will be published in a month or so. But I shared the photo with the group. It's pretty clever - at least I think it is. I used embroidery on it and the software to help create the embroidery.

Quality and creativity of my trunk shows is not my downfall. My downfall is in the number of items that I've got. Oh yes - I have tons of quilts, but for the most part - they are "just" quilts. They don't show off the fancy stitches and techniques that can be done in the sewing machine and the software. Let's just say that I'm making lists and need to prioritize those lists and get working. I see that my machines will be running day and night to get everything done!

It's a totally open and creative process and well - my imagination is the only thing that's stopping me from getting this done. I have days scheduled for "play" dates in my calendar. And when a weekend freed itself up recently, I almost gave it away to a group sewing day, but I did NOT!

We had a presentation about the embroidery software which is capable of so many things - my head is still spinning from that presentation. I think sometimes the problem is that we have the tools, we have the creativity, but we don't know what we have exactly. Does that make sense? We don't know what our tools are capable of and that's why we tend to stay in the box. I'm not sure if that's it - but it's my goal (and my job) to show people what you can make those sewing machines do! Yep - it's going to be busy at my house.

The other educators are so extremely helpful and I've had great conversations with almost all of them and that will help me enormously as I go forward. I have a "job" that a friend asked me to do. Oh yes - it can be done - the question is how. I have a much better idea how - I just need to try it out. I know they're going to ask me this morning if it worked, so I had better make an effort this morning to find out! I need to find a certain picture first.

We went out to dinner last night in small groups. I really like the small group thing. We had another topic of conversation and this one was much harder than the first night. I'm not sure that we really got some good answers for the question, but we tried. The team here has really made an effort to make us all welcome and that's pretty awesome.

There's so much to plan and so much to make! We played around in the afternoon to "pretend" we were students making one of the projects. Something I'd not really done much of and that was stitching on cards. Using the decorative stitches to make cards. Some pretty fun and funky things happened in class. Again - it all goes back to understanding what tools you have in the sewing machine. I learned a LOT.

After we got back to the hotel, a couple of us sat in the lobby and chatted a bit. Between driving to and from the office and splitting into groups, they have tried to put us in different groups all the time but there are a couple of people that I haven't really touched base with and I got to chat to some new people in the lobby last night. It's all about networking and I feel I'm pretty good at it. The gift of the gab and I'm not afraid to ask questions! Thanks, Dad!

On that note, I'm out of here. Got some important e-mail to be done this morning.

Have a great day!

Ciao!