I had a great time at KWCS in Philly this weekend, due entirely to wonderful friends and interesting classes.
Friday night was a fun dinner and hanging out with Drea and Calli, and the food was delicious. The applewood smoked ham calzone was super yummy.
Saturday I skipped the first class I had on my schedule, but I was moving slow and taking my time. oh well. It allowed me time to chat and visit with folks before settling in for a day of learning.
I really enjoyed the
Pleated and Embroidered 16th cent Shirts class. I can see why others might have complaints, but considering the information covered, I thought it was an excellent intro class to the evolution of some shirt construction and basic into to pleatwork embroidery without going into too much mind-boggling technical detail.
I also loved the unintentional companion classes of the
Ins and Outs of Extant Garments by Drea Leed, and
Working with a Mundane Textile Collection. They showed great examples of extant pieces, some of the problems of recreating exactly from those pieces due to different postures now vs. then, some of the cool details found when taking a close look, what materials to prepare when you have the option to look at extant pieces from a museum collection (pencil, paper, gloves, calipers, markers, scale, etc.) There was also a bit of the lifting of the veil on the state of museum collections, problems with cataloging, the reasons to be as specific as possible in your questions, etc. Both had different foci, but were wonderful classes.
Alas I skipped the V-neck gown class, which I heard was insanely crowded, to sprang geek with Kyle from the East and look at his various attempts to recreate the pink and green argyle garters from the MFA, both playing with scale and patterning. He's on a good path and has an appointment to view them, which I know he'll adore. So cool!
Then I went shopping and got so distracted that I was a tad late to teaching my own class. Oops! Luckily I wasn't too late and since it was the last hour of the day I could go over the hour allottment. I hated that I felt like a monkey on crack when teaching and bouncing all over the place on the details, but did try to cover as much as possible. I wish I had more focus, but there were wonderful folks who asked great questions that let me fill in the blanks that I had skipped over. I was also grateful for the interest in butterfly token sales and that most of my handouts when away. I now only have 4 more butterfly tokens, and another decent donation I need to send up to Plimoth. Whoo!
Saturday night was enjoyable hanging out with the Spanish Peacocks with James and Calli fetching dinner back to the hotel, fun partying with amazing ladies who I rarely get quality time with, not enough sangria, various states of undress, and good times. We stayed up far too late, but had such fun that it was completely worth it. Alas I didn't join in on some of the puppy-piling as I had a slight tickle in my throat I didn't want to share. This turned out to be a very good idea as I've now been home sick and slow for the past 3 days. Bleargh.
Sunday I took the Frauenrock class, which had a lot of great information in it, and loved the aha moments of the hat portion of the hours. Whooo! I then spent the rest of the time hanging out and chatting with folks, and got so distracted chatting and comparing notes with Drea L. that I ended up skipping the Wappenrock class. Rats! Ah well, I hope for the notes to help me out when I get to that stage.
Kit and I took off around 5pm as things wound down, and I blathered to her the whole way home about the different classes I took, what value I got out of them, etc. She had the bright idea of calling Jim and Sandy as we were within 20 minutes of their place when we started thinking food. Though they had eaten, there were leftovers for us and we had a wonderful few hours stopping and visiting with them and chatting. Dinner and fun companionship is far better than the travel plaza we hit on the way up. We even got some beagle love. Made it home around 9pm to crash all too soon.
I realized that some of this pedagogy and putting together of classes for a coherent teachable moment from work has rubbed off on me. I did some mental comparing of classes and where things could be improved, what went right, what gave a good feel and what was a tad off-putting. I need to analyze any future classes I do from this point of view as it seemed some were more enjoyable and exciting than others and most of that has to do with delivery rather than interest in the subject.
Must think further on this, but for now another nap on the comfy couch of doom.
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