Day One at the Crow Barn

I'm finally getting moment to blog about my experience at the Nancy Crow workshop! I was reminded to hurry up by an Anonymous reader (and you know who you are. ;-) because people are waiting! I know my mother has been bugging me about it.

Anyway, my plans to blog daily were very quickly thrown out the window due to the bad internet connection at the hotel, but more importantly by the fact that I was too exhausted at the end of the day to do anything other than read and respond to the millions of emails sent by my husband (and I thought I would be able to get away from work by driving to Ohio, right).

So what happened? Well, here's the deal:

On Sunday morning I left my comfy room at the Bedford Resort...



And drove off towards Ohio in my fabric packed car . . .



I arrive in Lancaster, OH at around 3:00pm and checked into my room at the Shaw Inn and Restaurant. While it was not quite the Bedford, it was clean and comfortable.

Next stop -- The Barn! They were well prepared for the needs of people bearing loads of fabric. There was a drive way that looped around the barn so you could pull up right next to the doorway to unload. It all went very quickly with the help of Nathan, Nancy's son, who made it look easy carrying in all the heavy stuff for me.



I was one of the last ones to arrive, but I quickly set up my studio away from home - setting my sewing machine and fabric stash in my little corner.

After set up time, the dinner bell rang and we all followed the call. A lovely dinner, created by chef Margaret Wolf, was set out buffet-style in the dining room area. With both workshops (the other workshop was taught by Fran Skiles) there was almost 40 people there.

After dinner, we were given a brief overview of the workshop plan and rules of the barn. Then one by one we stood up and introduced ourselves. There were quite a few people from New York and there was also another innkeeper! I think the furthest anyone had come was from Hawaii. It was a wonderfully deverse group of talent and professions. But what was also amazing was that two women who had been in the first Nancy Crow workshop that I took in the early 1990's in Mountain View, CA were there, too! They were both in the Fran Skiles workshop that week and were staying around for the following week for the Master's class with Nancy.

The class was to start the next morning at 9:00am sharp, so we all went home to our respective hotels to get a good nights sleep.