My Reward

If you do one good deed your reward usually is

to be set to do another and harder and better one.

~ C. S. Lewis

Sorry I've been neglecting my blog lately - I had a couple of extremely stressful weeks at work.  As my friends and I used to say when we were children, it was h-e-double-toothpicks!  ;)

But I survived and, over the weekend, I had my reward!  A two and a half day workshop on Andean Pebble Weave - a technique in backstrap weaving - with the guru (gur-ess?) of backstrap weaving, Laverne Waddington!

It was intense and amazing!  But let me back up a little bit.

The weekend was the Florida Tropical Weaver Guild's Annual Conference, held at the Lake Yale Baptist Center in Leesburg, Florida.

The conference went from Thursday afternoon through Sunday afternoon.  We stayed in hotel/dormitory rooms on the property:

The conference itself was held in a church building on the lake.  The vendors set up in the sanctuary - and we had our evening events there too.  

Most of the vendors were selling yarn of some sort - from pre-spun wool to hand-dyed yarn.  The hall was a riot of bright colors!

There were also a couple of vendors selling (fair trade) traditional hand made pieces from indigenous people around the world.  

Meals were served cafeteria style and the food was satisfactory.  Nothing to rave about, but there were plenty of options and it was filling.  :)

Evening activities included a fashion show and a business meeting.  As you might imagine, the business meeting was a bit boring, but I did learn something interesting.  Do you have any idea how much it costs to pull off an event like this?  Turns out it's a bit over $25,000!  And they need approximately 90 attendees to break even (their goal).

So, it's a relatively small conference compared to some of the sewing conventions I've attended...  Yikes - can you even imagine how much one of those costs to organize and hold?

Okay, I'm going to save the weaving shots for a second post, so I'll wrap up this post with a couple of pictures of the lake itself, at sunrise on Saturday.