Life is beautiful ...

Rebecca Staunton Coffey and I recently spent four days at the Brisbane Stitches and Craft Show running workshops in hand stitching and using our Aliquilts fabrics. There were so many people - and we got to share our love of cloth and stitch with many of them. Our workshop classes ran three times a day and were full of interesting participants - some we knew and others we met for the first time. Not long after a totally different workshop had finished further along the aisle, a lady came and sat at one of our tables so she could finish stitching a small purse. We didn't mind at all - we share our love of textiles with everyone and our next workshop was still half an hour away. Rebecca was taking some more bookings and we hadn't done the final set up so please - sit at our table for a while.
The next workshop started like a charm - lots of questions and opportunities to learn from each other. We had two sets of tables - one for 8 participants and the other catering for about 7 more. I worked mostly in the small space  between them which, when workshops were not in progress, allowed people to walk through to the back wall and look at our quilts, cushion covers by Jane and other samples.  During workshops there was only room for one person to move in that narrow space - me.
So I'm mid-sentence showing the two groups a quilt where I'd used chain stitch and whipped running stitch to create texture when "BANG" -  a person who (to be fair)  may have simply overlooked her medication at breakfast, swoops into the space where I'm standing, bumps me out of the way and snatches the demonstration piece from my hands to examine the stitching.   I was too stunned to say anything and proceeded after a moment as if nothing had happened.
We were almost 40 minutes into the same class when a small voice  from one of the tables said  "Hmmm ... we're not making purses in this class, are we?"  Life is beautiful and all credit to the three ladies who never did get to that purse workshop.Welcome to the land of stress free hand stitching!