Friday, April 2, 2010

Random Thoughts


bamboo and wool/lycra

My supply of wool/lycra is nearly gone (I think there may be 16 cones left) so I was pleased to see that Ashford now supplies colcolastic - a cotton/lycra yarn - and in a variety of colours. I'd made plans to include this new yarn in Magic in the Water, Part II and test drive it in the workshop at Columbus, OH in May ..... BUT..... when I started investigating air fares, it was going to cost twice as much as my workshop fee to get me from here to there.

I offered to cancel the workshop, and they accepted my offer. :(

While I like living where I do I also have to accept the fact that I live a long way from anywhere else. Out of the $1000+ air fare to get to Columbus, $500 of that is just to get me from Prince George to Vancouver. The shortest leg of the journey.

So now I'm wondering if there is even any point in my continuing to offer to teach for guilds. When it costs twice as much to get me to the guild event than it does to pay me to teach, it's the airlines that are making the bulk of the money. :( OTOH, weavers don't realize that - they just know that it's way too expensive to have me come to them.

If the workshops in Joplin had gone ahead there would at least have been two groups to share the cost of travel, but for a variety of reasons there weren't enough people for them to go ahead and the entire cost of travel fell onto the Columbus guild's shoulders.

Right now I have just two events booked for next year, one in January, one in July, both in the east of the USA. If guilds on the eastern seaboard want to share travel costs with either John C. Campbell Folk School or NEWS, let me know. Either that or sign up for the events so that they are full and the two organizers can afford to pay the travel costs.....

Currently reading Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett

3 comments:

wonderous woolerie said...

Hm, that is a hard one to get around!

Peg in South Carolina said...

I have never heard of a workshop, in any field, which doesn't pay travel expenses and related costs!

Laura Fry said...

The travel expenses would have added $75 for each participant to the registration fee. They didn't feel they could afford to pay that much on top of the rest of the expenses - teaching fee, room rental, materials etc....Air fare was nearly double my teaching fee. :(

That's why I'm looking for other groups to share in the travel for the two workshops booked for 2011.

L