Retreat report part 3

Saturday was the last day of the retreat and was the busiest.

First up, class at 9 am. This class was with Amy Mitten and was a mourning sampler based on a murder mystery story written by Amy. She also had some other mourning samplers based on aspects of the story. We also went on a field trip to her room to watch a DVD she had made to illustrate the different symbols used on Victorian tombstones. It was all pretty interesting.



After lunch, it was off to the last class with the ladies from R&R reproductions. They had designed a lovely halloween stitching case. It was a pretty relaxed class. After explaining the stitches used in the piece, Pat showed off her finished Moulin rouge sampler in blue and her WIP of Fish city by Stoney Creek. Both looked lovely. They also chatted about the shop they opened with another lady in Virginia Beach.

And then it was time for the evening banquet. The theme of the banquet was a murder mystery, hosted by Lady Kloster Block whose husband was murdered. Each table was allocated a character name and we had to come up with why they would have murdered Lord Kloster Block. Each table had a spokesperson who then told their character's story. With each story, things got more and more outrageous.
Lots of people got dressed up for the party. Teri from Shepherds bush played the character of a clarevoyant and Charland played a detective called Aida Hoops. It was a lot of fun.





And so the retreat was over. On Sunday I headed home via Chicago and London. With each flight there was a delay. The worse was in Chicago where we were almost 3 hours late leaving as American Airlines didn't have the plane. You would think that with having a timetable, they might have some advanced warning that they need a Boeing 777 ready to fly to London. They told us we had to wait for it to come from another part of the airport. I know O'Hare is a big airport but seriously, it sounds that American airlines are pretty useless at organising things. When I got to Heathrow, they had kindly sent one person to assist people who had following flight - he was pretty overwhelmed and I had an hour to make my connecting flight. I got as far getting to the security point at the entrance to the gate to be told that I now had too much hand luggage. I had checked my hold baggage at Salt Lake and no one told me it would be a problem. So then I had to clear customs and passport control and run to the desk to check a bag. Where I met a series of very unhelpful British Airways employees. I was very stressed but polite and they were ignorant and unfriendly. I ran through to the gate through security again and got to the gate to discover that British Airways didn't have a plane either. Okay I thought the whole thing about airports was that they had planes there. After a short delay, I got on the plane to an annoucement to say that there was no catering and we were going to wait at the gate for it. After another short delay, the pilot announced that we weren't going to wait anymore. We only got as far as the bit just before the runaway, where we got another annoucement to say that we had to wait for an hour as a storm had come in just outside Heathrow and it was unsafe to take off right then. I felt like pointing out that if we had taken off when we should, we would have beat the stupid weather. Finally I got to Glasgow over 2 hours late and very tired and fed up.

On a brighter note, I now have lots of new stash to play with.