Gartmore Part 1

Our weekend away to Gartmore has sadly been and gone. We did however, have lots of fun and there are plans for a third year. I don't have quite as many photo's as last year but not far off it. So I am going to have to do this in parts which I will post over the course of the week. As you can see from the sign above we got a friendly welcome to Gartmore.

Helen, Margaret and I were the first to arrive. We quickly dropped our bags off to our rooms. We then settled in the foyer with coffee and biscuits while we waited for everyone to arrive.

It didn't take long for us to make use of the space. In fact we had a room next door to ours with a large table for us to spread out any big projects we were working on. Roberta took advantage of it to lay out a crochet blanket she has been working on. She is attaching granny squares as a border to make it larger.

Isobels goal was to make a quilt in a weekend. She used the large table to set out her cutting matt and prepare the material she was using. The lovely lady helping her is Patsy. She came along as Ally sadly took ill and couldn't come. Patsy is a knitter too and, fingers crossed, will be able to come along to the group soon.

Izzy's sewing machine was set up in the main room which allowed her too chat whilst working away (also allowed us to do our nosy as she worked away).

The rest of us settled on the comfy couches and worked away on our projects. Donna was finishing off some baby presents. Patsy was knitting a jumper but she was using two different patterns. Cleverly putting together the bits she liked from each. Roberta was working on another crochet blanket. Alison was working on her bird cross stitch. Helen was knitting a pair of socks for herself (and quite rightly too). Margaret was knitting a baby jumper for a friend. Magdalena was knitting a lovely jumper for herself. Dawn (who is there somewhere, honest) was knitting beautiful baby bootees. Lastly, I was knitting a blanket for myself.

Oh, and baby Jan was there to keep us all right. Here he is making sure his mum's knitting meets his approval. He kept us all entertained through out the weekend.

After lunch I started my sock knitting class. Dawn wanted to learn to knit cuff down adult socks. Elaine also wanted to learn and so I offered it as a class. Dawn has been taught toe up socks and Elaine learned to knit baby socks at last years weekend so this was really just a refresher. I don't have any pictures of finishes as it will take more than a few hours to teach but I promise to take photo's when they are finished.

During the lesson Dawn showed us a unique way of storing the extra needle until needed. Donna also joined the class when she needed help with her first pair of patterned socks. I enjoyed taking the class and hope Dawn and Elaine enjoyed it too.

After a busy day we were spoiled with a large dinner. By this point June had, thankfully, been able to join us. June had brought along a few animal cross stitch projects to work on. She spent the hour before dinner sorting the threads a teddy bear kit.

After our lovely dinner we had another class which I'll update with in the next post.