Gartmore!

As promised this post is going to be all about Gartmore. First of all I have a little amendment to make. It has come to my attention that I may have left Margaret off the list of people who were there on that first night. Sorry Margaret! However, she was there and has rarely missed a night since.

Gartmore is in a lovely place just outside Stirling. Sock lady Ginnie came up with the fantastic idea of going there for our second anniversary and we have been ever year since. We already have 2013 planned. You can see why we miss our sock lady. She comes up with all the best ideas.

The point of Gartmore is that you get to relax, do a bit of crafting, a lot of chatting and a lot of eating (you don't go away hungry).  From the start we had got lots of ideas from each other or sought out help from others in the group. This was the first time though that we started giving demos and lessons.

In our first year we got crochet lessons from Donna. Most of us learnt the granny square here. We also got an inadvertent Japanese patchwork demo from Val. Lastly sock lady Ginnie gave us a lesson on sock knitting.

We learnt a lot and most importantly we had a lot of fun. We did go back after all.

The second year I gave a small sock knitting lesson to Dawn and Elaine. I think Donna took part in some of that too. Elaine showed off some of her cake decorating skills and had us making iced roses. That was definitely a little bit different. Then Donna gave us more crochet lessons but this time different stitches and different ways of doing the granny square.

I am afraid I wasn't there last year but Isabel and Helen reported back between them. Everyone got to have dinner in a different part of the building this time. It made for a lovely change of scenery. Izzi taught everyone how to make these little purses. Elaine taught everyone to decorate cupcakes with butterflies (not real ones obviously) and Roberta gave a few people some lessons on crochet.

Another aspect we love about Gartmore is the scenery. If you get tired of sitting on your bum the grounds are lovely for a walk and most of us at some point took advantage of that. We did have to keep an eye on June though to make sure she didn't add any of the rabbits to her collection of pets.

This year we have more lessons planned and we are all looking forward to it. I think there is a slightly larger crowd going this time.  It will be good fun.

Tomorrow I am going to showcase the rest of our events all in one. Tomorrow is also celebration day (well one of two).