ASG 2008

Every year, for quite a few years, I've been going to ASG in the fall. I started going and didn't know anyone except Rae & Ron who put the entire thing on. Over the years I've made quite a few friends and have had some excellent classes from fantastic teachers. This year was yet another great weekend.

I was very happy that we were back on Hilton Head Island, SC. Although I'm not a "beach person" I love Hilton Head, maybe because of all the trees, even if they do make it terribly hard to find your way to a new resort in the dark. Our hotel/resort was wonderful, both the accommodations and the people who worked there. Kudos to them for making our stay very enjoyable.

Thursday I went to work, bright and early, so I could leave at 3 and head to SC to meet up with DFs Jean, Jill, Heather and Ann. They were driving in from Atlanta, Ann having spent the night at Chez Jean. They made it there before I did and amused themselves with some shopping at the outlets. It took me longer then I thought, probably because the state of GA has most of I-95 torn up and actually had workers out so you had to go 55 and 60 most of the way. By the time I made it, dusk was settling in, ok, it was dark people. Now I had my cute little GPS all cranked and had the address to the Marriott in it, but that really didn't help. I still managed to take a wrong turn. I swear she said to "in the roundabout, take the 1st right", which I did. However, that led to the Hilton. It looked like a lovely hotel, it was just the wrong lovely hotel. Thank goodness I hang with a group of geekylovely women who all own multiple electronic communication devices. Jean, being the "early adopter" among us, has an iPhone and she's who I called first since she was driving and might have the best shot at telling me how to get to the right hotel. She didn't, but the guy at the front desk, where she was thankfully standing, could and I arrived while 2 bellmen were unloading the "Party Van" (tm). Between the 5 of us, we had 2 very full luggage carts. I'm not sure how we managed to fly to Knoxville (I mean) Louisville the last few years. It may be that if we can't bring our entire households, we actually manage to pack only the essentials. Thankfully this year we could all drive. I say this for a number of reasons.

1) Because we could bring lots of fun things. Some knitting, some stitching, some brownies, some alcoholic drinks, my new Mac Book Pro, printer, remote hard drive, wireless router and sundry other items. (Let me take a moment to thank Richard & Jean. Richard is a great guy. He set my new computer up for me and got everything ready to go so I could just start using it. Thanks Richard! And thanks Jean for bringing me all the stuff.)

2) We had great teachers and projects. First we had a great class from Catherine Jordan. First we painted our linen, then we stitched on it. See...
Well, that's kind of what it will look like when I'm done. This is what it looked like when I started.
That's the top on the left and the inside part on the right. I went for the look of some of the beaches in the Bahamas.
Here's with some of my ship stitched in. I need to go back and put another row in the bottom of the ship and finish the sails. I looks much more interesting in person.

The rest of the rundown will have to wait for tomorrow. Stay tuned.

ETA: Changed Knoxville to Louisville, since apparently I was so tired I didn't know what I was typing. Not that Knoxville isn't lovely, it's just not where we've been going the last few years.