Sew Many Places with Jim

I was back from Ireland for only a day and drove six hours south to be here in Paducah for the convention. Jaci and Anne arrived a couple days ago and set up our booth. We are the “official” travel company for AQS, so they put the location of our booth in a great spot.

Lot’s of people have stopped by to register for the free cruise we are giving away on Saturday.  It’s to the Caribbean in 2008 during January.

John Flynn is here and did a fantastic job on a piece of art that is beautifully displayed in the hallway.  He has taken a large-lifesize figure of a horse and put patchwork designs and fabric all over it from head to toe.  GREAT JOB JOHN!  It looks mmmmaaaaawwwwvelous.!

Bonnie Browning is here, running around everywhere to make sure the entire event goes well.  Good job Bonnie!

I have to say, now that we have been in this industry for over four years, it’s the first time that I’ve actually felt we are an important part of it.  So many people have stopped me in the hallways or come to our booth, people who have traveled with us in the past.  And of course, I have to get my hug from each one of them.  They all express their appreciation and joy recalling one of the trips they had been on with Sew Many Places. I feel great about that, and I can only hope I am doing Doreen Speckman proud.  She was the first to take quilters on trips many years ago, and I hope if she was still alive today, she would feel I am filing her shoes with the same enthusiasm she approached all of her trips. 

I will give you more of a ‘quilting’ report once I have a chance to look around the covention floor and enjoy all the incredible things there are to see and do.

Thanks Bonnie and the AQS family, it’s great to be here!

Jim

Alright, here I am home from our Ireland tour, and I promised to write daily about all the wonderful things we were doing. Truth be told, the trip was an absolute HIT, and each day we were so busy with touring, shopping or quilting, by the time I got to my room at night in front of my computer, I was too exhausted to write.

So let me recap for a moment.  The real key factors that made this trip so great were the following-first, our bus driver Mark was a ten out of ten. Funny, charming, quick to help out everyone who had questions or needed something and just a real gem of a guy.

Second was Pat Sloan and her husband Greg. It’s one thing to travel with celebrities who offer great quilting class, but Pat and Greg, from the very beginning, were considerate, extremely helpful and offered their services to the group when it didn’t even involve the class.  And believe me, these are the kinds of people I will continue to bring on all my trips because there are no ego problems or attitude.  Thanks to both of them!

Third, and probably the most important to the success of this tour, were the people who joined us.  They came from all over the United States, Canada and two people from Korea.  (I love you Alice and Ross) Our group of ladies from Florida and Atlanta were so fun and funny, and everyone on the tour made a real effort to be on time, not complain and pitch in wherever some assistance was needed.  (A real travel agent’s dream group!)

The fourth factor to the success of our tour was the weather. We had sunny weather for most of our days and it only rained once, on the last day. Ireland with only one day of rain, how awesome was that!

And finally, last, but not least, was meeting the quilting lassies from Killarney and Dublin.  All were generous with their gifts, quilts for show and tell and smiles.  The Irish quilting ladies offered all of us a real glimpse of the genuine hearts that so many people have in Ireland.

Overall, this tour is something that ranks high on the charts as one of my favorites-EVER! 

I want to thank our entire group for their generosity, kind words and support.  I look forward to traveling with all of you again.

If any of you who traveled on this tour would like to make a comment, I would appreciate it if you would share some of your thoughts on this blog and mention some of the things that were the most memorable.

By the way, we had a limerick contest on the last day, and I am happy to report that some of them were clean!

God Bless you all and may the wind always be at your back!

Jim

And a very good day to ye all! Well, we started an exciting quilting adventure today with Pat Sloan and a large group of very special quilters in the Emerald Isle.  I arrived in Dublin a couple days ago, flying in from Italy after just escorting a group there.

When I arrived, I had the taxi take me to my deluxe hotel in the central part of town. Wow, what an active, bustling place Dublin is!

Grafton Street, a shopping meca in the city, boasts fantastic boutique shops with everything you can possibly imagine.  And yes, I found a fabric shop!  It’s called Hickey’s, which is located in the mall just down from my hotel.

I walked in the shop and saw all kinds of colorful patterns, some for upolstry and a lot of other fabric for quilts.

The owner of the shop wasn’t in, but I did manage to get the clerk to tell me more about the fabric.  It evidently comes from England, none of it from Ireland.  But that is fine, because at least our group from America wasn’t going to be buying something they can buy in the states.

Our group doesn’t actually arrive in Dublin for a few days, I had just flown in a couple days earlier to check things out.

Today I met them all at the airport.  For traveling all night on the plane, I have to honestly say, they were not cranky, whinny or anything negative.  Tired of course, but very, very happy to be here.

We got everything packed on the bus, and we were off to Killarney.  We stopped in a charming village called Adare for lunch and continued to drive through the most charming little villages you can only imagine.  The scenery was great as well as our marvelous bus driver, Mark.

We had Mark on last year’s Ireland trip with Joan Shay, and he is just as charming and funny as ever.  What a gem.

Tonight we all had dinner together at the hotel, introduced ourselves individually to the group and then I introduced Pat. 

She showed the group the wonderful project they would be making in class tomorrow night, as well as introducing the group to two Leisure Arts Publishing reps who are along with us.

I can’t spill the beans yet, but here’s a hint………………………..Pat Sloan author in Ireland with two publishing company reps, hmmmmmmmmmmmmm what do you think is going to happen?!  

That’s all I can say at the moment, I don’t want to give too much away.

Anyway, tomorrow we are going to go and drive the RING OF KERRY.  And the weather man says it’s going to be sunny and nice-60 degrees.

I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, even though this is only the first day of the trip, I can tell you, we’ll be coming back to Ireland next year.  It’s a real joy to be sure.