Test Drive for Prague

During the last weeks I have felt a bit like the frog who jumped into the jug of cream and is now paddling around like mad, waiting for the cream to turn into butter so that it can get out of the mess it got itself into...
I am hoping that, once I return from the Prague Patchwork Meeting AND the workshop that Kathy Loomis will be teaching here will be over, my butter will have settled!
Part of the density of it all - to be honest, a very large part - is the involvement with the refugees, which has been taking much more time than I knew I had still at my disposal... Three to five hours of one-on-one German lessons per week is fun, because my student is very studious, very eager to learn and a wonderful person to get to know. But add to that regular visits to their house (and you can't just stop by and leave again after a brief chat, you have to spend time if you don't want to be rude or inconsiderate), arranging appointments for doctor's visits and accompanying them for translation, picking somebody up at the hospital, enrolling a child in kindergarten ...
And there was still stuff to prepare for the Prague Patchwork Meeting. Where I will be going next week to accompany the first exhibition of International Threads, but I will also be demonstrating at the Bernina stand, and teaching a half-day workshop. So I had to make sure that everything I need for the demonstration is ready to the point where I can just talk about and show what I do when I do what I will be demonstrating. For this, a certain amount of preparations was necessary - made more difficult by the fact that a) I don't know the type of machine on which I will have to do the demonstrations, and b) my own machine is away for maintenance, again, so the preparations had to be done on my old Bernina.

text messages 7, in progress

This machine does take this thicker thread -
but will the one in Prague as well...?

Which worked out fine, I think I am all set, but it was a tense time... What I don't have yet, and won't be able to finish any more before I leave on Thursday, is a handout for the half-day workshop. People will actually have to take notes on what I am saying. I hope they can manage that!
And I managed to finish the pages which we want to display at the exhibition, today. Before being able to do that, I had to get my husband to take my photo, because all the ones I had were very out of date, and every attempt at taking a 'selfie' returned unsatisfactory results!

What I could not finish today was printing out the signs of quilt names to be added to our display, because one of the members of the group (I'm not giving a name here!) managed to forget to send me the last two titles of quilts she was still finishing as we were compiling the list for insurance values, on which I was going to base the signs. So that will have to wait until Tuesday afternoon, when I return from a two-day-visit to my parents, together with my family. Just as well that we are going by train - let's just hope the German railway system is up to its former high standards and does not present us with surprises!
So the frog is still paddling. But it hasn't drowned yet, there is hope for the butter.