Surviving Saturday

It took 19 hours of sleep, but I'm finally recovered from the preparations for my Kumihimo classes, and my first ever two classes in one day on Saturday. It was both harder and better than I thought it would be.

Harder because I had to work much more than usual on class prep. When I'm teaching seed bead weaving, I've got the flow down. I plan out the class in my head before teaching it the first time, and do adjustments as needed after that, but for the most part, I've been doing it long enough now that it comes fairly effortlessly. By changing mediums this time, I had to think and plan and run through the whole class in my head a LOT more to get to a good comfort level prior to the day. I think it's good to stretch those mental muscles periodically so I'm really glad I did it. And the flow and class went just great, so it was a successful exercise in growing my teaching skills.

Speaking of which, everyone had a GREAT time and loved the Kumihimo! They were almost all folks who'd bought the loom before, but then got intimidated by the instructions and unfamiliar things. When I stepped them through it, they realized it wasn't so scary after all, and now they're all dying to jump in to even more advanced techniques. Guess that's my next class to develop!

I do plan on proposing some "poor woman's Kumihimo" classes for the national shows next year that will incorporate not only the Japanese braiding technique, but also some seed bead weaving components too. Unfortunately, I can't even do any Kumihimo tonight during the season premiere of "24", because I sold ever last loom I had in the house! Drat it!

But it's probably a good thing too. Because I have ten billion or so things to do before I leave for the Texas Beader's Retreat on Friday. If you tried signing up for my Parisian Lights class at the retreat and found it was already full, try contacting Sandy Pardo again as I offered to teach a second session of it on Saturday afternoon since there were so many who were interested. I'll have plenty of kits too...