and so much more

I have continued to be very busy.

My son got married on May 22 in Michigan so we were all there for the wedding...there went a week away from home.

I returned home and got ready to teach with the  Twisted Sisters group at Rohnert Park We had three days of hard work creating new fabrics with various surface design techniques. They certainly made of a lot of new fabric! What fun it was!

And before I knew it, I was packing for Switzerland.  I have much to write about but not tonight as my time is very limited here.

This is outside the hotel where we are having our seminar. We are up in the mountains at about 4200 feet and it is a steep climb to get up here. I arrived via a cog train which brought me to my final point for five days. It was a long flight from SFO to Heathrow, and nice flight to Geneva but we could not fly directly for some reason and were 30 minutes late in arriving so I missed my train to Leysin. I caught the next one but this put poor Chritiane Studer (the very nice woman who has put the seminar together) in to almost heart failure as she had gone to the train station to pick me up and I wasn't there.  She was so happy when I arrived by taxi!

Meals are huge! Breakfast has many choices, including various cheeses and bread which are to die for, cereals if you want, hard boiled eggs, and lots of other goodies including Norwegian smoked salmon.

and then we break for coffee after working 1.5 hours. Which includes coffee, tea, hot chocolate, etc and some kind of coffee cake along with more fruit.

and in another hour and a half we stop for lunch which is really dinner. The Swiss do not eat like this at home but this is at a plush resort hotel. He have had duck with a wonderful sauce one day, today we had sole, also in a delicious sauce, always with a salad before hand from a salad bar with wonderful goodies, the least of which is lettuce. Dinners are similar but we are served a first course...two days ago it was a plate filled with smoked salmon. And then on to dinner which has been lanb, or roast beef  along with scallops in another wonderful sauce, beef,  and already I have lost track of everything we have been having. And the desserts show up....four little scoops of special differenct sorbets in a chocolate line waffle bowl and other drizzles of some sort of sauce and other little special things. I have now learned to leave lunch before dessert comes as two a day is a little too much.

Oh yes, after lunch the class resumes at 2pm because it takes 1.5 hours to eat lunch. Then we stop for tea and some other goodie an hour and a half later. We stop the class at 5:30 pm and then have dinner at 7pm which will also last 1.5-2 hours...very leasurily and beautifully presented.

this is the smoked salmon before dinner

In between eating my students have been working exceptionally hard. Here is one group working on their color wheel.

And the other group just as busy.

I have 12 studetns who come from France, Switzerland and Germany. Of course, everyone speaks French except me. I am finding that if I really listen closely, sometimes I can tell what they are saying. Christian has supplied with with Martine, who does a wonder job  translating for me. And if she isn't sure there are other people in the classroom who also help.

I have left them finishing their first quilts and staring on the second one. We will put the work up and I will be taking pictures of everyone with their work.

And, very special, three of my former students from my online class are here. It has been wonderful to meet them in person and there are giving me a bad time about why I haven't done the advanced class so they could take it...well, decision made, it will be offered in January.

So, I must get ready to go for dinner....oh, this is so difficult! And so very much fun. Everyone is absolutely delightful and a joy to be around. They are all very excited about what they have been learning and are looking forward to "new horizons".